Transportation

5 things you didn’t know about cable cars

Andrew Lam
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6

Get it out of the way now: roll those eyes. The cable cars are something no native San Franciscan would ever bring up in polite (that is, local) company, let alone write about in a blog post. But fact is, there’s a reason why these things are iconic. Those cars have as speckled and quirky a history as the City by the Bay. 

San Franciscans steeped in facts and figures about the tourist-movers probably know that ours is the last operating cable car system in the world and that its design hasn’t changed much since Andrew Hallidie devised it upon seeing an overloaded horse-car slip down a hill in the rain. Perhaps you’ve heard that the four remaining lines each rely on a continuous loop of cable running under your feet at a constant 9.5 miles per hour, powered by electrical motors and a system of pulleys and huge wheels. If you’ve ever visited the Cable Car Museum (c’mon folks, it’s free) you’ve seen the sheaves pulling the cable along, and you’ve learned that the cars operate by grabbing the cable with giant pliers that reach through the floor and into a slot in the street where the cable runs. 

Bored yet? Stifle that yawn, we’re just getting started. Read on for five things you haven’t heard about those postcard pretties.

 

I know why the caged bird . . . rings?

The famous author, poet, and social activist Maya Angelou dropped out of Mission High School at 15 to work the cable cars. “The thought of sailing up and down the hills of San Francisco in a dark-blue uniform, with a money changer at my belt, caught my fancy,” she later recalled in 1969’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou won the job as San Francisco’s first African American (and female) cable car conductor by heckling reluctant company managers until they caved and she was hired to ring the cars’ bells and swing “on the back of the rackety trolley, smiling sweetly and persuading [her] charges to ‘step forward in the car, please.’”

Smokin’ tracks

Ever noticed a certain funk riding in a cable car? It wasn’t the guy next to you. It’s caused by two materials that play a critical role in starting and stopping the car: the pine resin that greases the cable and the wooden brake shoes, made from Douglas fir, that press against the tracks to stop the car. Friction causes the wooden brakes to smoke, meaning they must be replaced every three days with new ones milled locally at a shop on 22nd Street and Indiana. Friction from the pliers-like grip grabbing the cable likewise melts and then vaporizes the pine tar. This results in a smooth, lubricated start-up, but is also responsible for the burning and odor. (And if that sounds a bit too familiar, perhaps you should call your doctor…) Like the wooden brakes, the grip that grabs the cable must be replaced every three days for wear.

The cable car: the Imelda Marcos of public transportation. (Stack of brake shoes at the Cable Car Museum). Photo by Emily Appelbaum

Move over, men

Working as a grip operator requires incredible dexterity and also the nuanced ability to feel the cable, picking it up slowly to ease the car to full speed. Though well over half of trainees drop from the teaching program each year, the required combination of subtlety and strength make gripping the perfect job for powerful women like Fannie Mae Barnes, who became the city’s first female grip in 1997. 

“A lot of guys will try to muscle the grip, but it’s really more a finesse thing – you have to leverage it with your body weight,” Barnes told the Guardian in an interview last fall. Barnes retired in 2007, but when San Francisco’s second female grip, Willa Johnson, took the post last April, Barnes presented her with a pair of custom-made pink leather grip gloves, emblazoned with her name.

Beyond the bells

The Slot Blades, named for the cars’ emergency braking system, is a band composed entirely of SF Muni workers who conduct and grip the city’s cable cars. Their moniker is a tongue of metal that, when deployed, wedges itself so tightly against the tracks it must be removed with a torch. The cable-proud band gets together for practices and jam sessions in addition to playing at Muni and cable car-related events like the annual Cable Car Bell Ringing Contest – now in its 49th year.

Falling cars and free love

Forget stranded cables and smashed cars: San Francisco’s most infamous cable car victim may be Gloria Sykes, who claimed that a 1964 accident left her with a black eye, bruises, and an unquenchable sex drive.

When a mechanical failure caused the car she was riding to slide backwards down a hill, Sykes – later dubbed the “cable car nymphomaniac” by the daily newspapers — sued the City of San Francisco for a half million dollars. Her lawyers argued that the sexual abuse she suffered as a child combined with the stress of the accident caused her to seek the company of up to 50 sexual partners a week. After listening to 44 taped transcripts of an electrically hypnotized Sykes, the jury awarded the insatiable (ha) plaintiff $50,000 in damages. Sykes’ case is cited as one of the earliest court-recognized examples of post-traumatic stress disorder.

 

San Francisco Cable Car Wheelhouse from Emily Appelbaum on Vimeo.

Check out the inner wheelings and dealings of the SF Cable Car Museum. Here, the whirling electric motors that power the cars. Video by Emily Appelbaum

 

Free Muni for kids

Zelda Bronstein
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19
Free Muni for kids

Sup. David Campos is talking about offering free Muni rides for some of San Francisco’s youth, and he’d like free passes for all school kids next year. That’s a great way for the city to work with SFUSD; the school district spends a huge amount of money on buses. In fact, transportation is the second biggest item in the district’s budget (after salaries). There ought to be a way for kids (above a certain age; maybe fifth grade) who now take SFUSD buses to get on Muni instead.


And let me tell you all a little secret: Most of the middle-school kids who ride Muni never pay anyway. They all pile on the bus after school and some have passes and some don’t and the driver can’t possibly keep up with who’s got what when 50 young people are climbing aboard all at once.


So if we can let them all ride free we can save money for the schools, which can go into the classrooms, and make life easier on the drivers and kids who can avoid the crazy scramble.


And if we can’t do that, or if the city wants some sort of reimbursement, there’s an easy solution: Sell Muni passes in the schools. Not to get too bureaucratic, but SFUSD already keeps track of family income levels (that’s how they do the free lunches) and it wouldn’t be that hard to issue Clipper cards that allow low-income kids to ride free. Kids who can afford it would get a card at the beginning of the year and their parents could put money on it at the Clipper web site (or the kids could do it themselves with a machine in the school office.)


I know it sounds complicated, but it’s way more complicated now; you have to take your kid in person to buy a youth pass and present a birth certificate. Way easier to do it at the schools, where that data is already in the system. A good deal for all: SFUSD agrees to devote one staffer at each middle and high school to the (part-time) job of issuing bus cards, and in exchange SFUSD students get to ride Muni free or cheap — and SFUSD gets to cut its transportation budget.


Why is this not a no-brainer?  


 

Ting’s “knee-jerk car populism”

Sasha Cuttler
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31
Ting’s “knee-jerk car populism”

By Asaf Shalev

Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting’s campaign for mayor is trying to rile up San Francisco’s car drivers with a new petition called “San Francisco Parking Ticket Overload,” but it seems to be misrepresenting the situation to score election season points.

In the recent email launching the petition, Ting provoked drivers to help “tear up the unfair ticket plan” in order to prevent “turning the whole city into a ‘parking trap.’” Ting said he opposes the MTA’s plan to jack up the enforcement of parking restriction by dolling out more tickets, which was reported in C.W. Nevius’s column. But Ting’s email also made it sound as if parking fines were going up and the MTA was launching a new initiative targeting drivers.

MTA spokesperson Kristin Holland told us that it isn’t true the agency has any intention to increase the cost of parking fines. In response, Ting spokesperson Eric Jaye (who ran Gavin Newsom’s two mayoral campaign) told us, “We are taking [the MTA] at their word and we are very happy to hear that,” insisting the campaign honestly thought that rates were going up.

Tom Radulovich, a transportation policy expert who founded Livable City, called Ting’s messaging and the stance behind it “knee-jerk car populism” and a “saber-rattling election stunt.” He said Ting’s campaign is playing to the fears of drivers who are the more privileged commuters of the city, with most studies showing motorists don’t pay the full costs of their impact to society.

“Even if [Ting’s claim] was true, the premise that motorists have an undue burden is untrue,” Radulovich said. Even with increased enforcement, drivers can still avoid fines by obeying the laws whereas all Muni passengers have had to bear the brunt of higher fares, which doubled under Newsom’s tenure. “I’d like to see someone saying how transit passengers have an unfair deal,” Radulovich said.

Jaye takes a different tone than some of the campaign missives. According to Jaye, what Ting opposes is that the increase in tickets is not the result of policy or enforcement considerations but specifically meant to increase revenue for the city. “We are just trying to pursue a revenue generating policy that is a little more progressive,” Jaye said. Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond also recently made the point that parking tickets were meant primarily to keep cars flowing in urban areas and not as a revenue source, but he also noted that motorists don’t pay for their impacts and should pay far higher car taxes.

But Radulovich’s question is left unanswered: “Are any of the candidates going to talk about the plight of transit passengers?”

MUNI gets beastly, in a nice way

Andrew Lam
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0

A horde of salt marsh mice scurry down Market Street. Salmon leap across Divisadero traffic. Blue Mission butterflies cover your #22 Fillmore. If you haven’t been doing any wildlife-spotting recently, keep those binoculars close by. A new MUNI art program seeks to bring endangered species to the forefront of our transit consciousness — making our much-maligned buses prettier to look at, and bringing Bay nature back into our daily lives all in one fell swoop.

Visual artist Todd Gilens and an installation team wrapped four city buses with large-scale images of local endangered wildlife in their natural abodes as part of a project called “Endangered Species.” In a space normally reserved for advertisements for bail bondsmen or the new season of Real Housewives, you can now peep aforementioned mice broods and threatened fish and bugs. Gilens came up with the idea after the publication of a municipal transportation agency’s transit effectiveness project. The report used stats to measure the efficacy of SF public transit, but the visual artist felt that something was missing from the survey’s findings: namely, the community presence of our modes of public transportation. 

“I’m a ‘thing’ guy,” says Gilens. “Objects have lives and tell interesting stories. I wanted to think more about what buses are, beyond their technical character.” In the case of buses, Gilens thought it possible that they could be more than just people containers from here to there. “Endangered Species,” a project that took years for him to research and secure funding for, is his aesthetic reclamation of public space.

He eventually found a partner in The Bay Nature Institute, a Berkeley-based publication and project dedicated to celebrating and conserving nature and wildlife in the Bay Area. The group’s website is now the online home for  “Endangered Species,” and houses a bus tracker application that give fauna fans the current locations of all four Endanger buses.

It would stand to reason that the Endanger buses would have some direct conservationist agenda. But for Gilens, the moving art is only about calling attention to the natural beauty in and around the Bay Area. When asked if the project was meant to engage with the public on an ethical level, he said the Endanger buses purpose was really in the eyes of the beholder. “Art helps us to refine our noticing, and from there we can respond according to our capacities.” 

MUNI gets mousey. Photo by Todd Gilens

But Gilens choice to focus on the Bay’s circumscribed members of the animal kingdom might have another reading, one that strikes close to home for creative types being priced out of the city’s stubbornly sky-high rent prices. He made an interesting connection between art and endangered species: “Art is also not very ‘useful,’ perhaps in a similar way that a unique butterfly species or a marsh mouse is superfluous in their environment — But without them we have a flatter, duller, and certainly less robust world.”

Gilens hopes that seeing Endanger buses amongst the city hustle and bustle, will promote new ways of assessing personal experience – and one’s morning commute. “I hope that the beauty and unexpectedness of the images in different situations will invite playful associations. Perhaps the project will encourage a more connected and creative approach to everyday life,” he says. “Whether it’s allowing oneself to be moved by something beautiful, making room for another stranger on a bus, or becoming curious about even stranger life forms beyond urbanization.” Endangered artist or domesticated office rat, at least San Franciscans can agree that Endanger buses will be a refreshing sight to see amongst the city’s urban forest.

The Endanger buses will be out and about until April on different city lines each day. For more information on them – and how you can participate in MUNI’s bus-spotting game for prizes — go to www.baynature.org/endangerbus

 

CA Labor stats: Bay Area schools shed jobs, department stores hire

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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2
CA Labor stats: Bay Area schools shed jobs, department stores hire

A new set of labor market data released Jan. 21 by California’s Employment Development Department reveals that unemployment in San Francisco was 9.2 percent in December 2010, compared with 12.3 percent for California and 9.1 percent for the nation during the same period.

Marin County had the lowest unemployment rate of all California counties in that month, and San Francisco had the fifth lowest. Worst off was Imperial County, with an unemployment rate of 28.3 percent.

In San Francisco, Marin, and San Mateo counties, there were 800 more jobs than in the previous month, according to the data. Yet while some sectors actually hired new employees, others continued to let people go.

Government in the three counties cut back by 2,200 jobs — mostly in local public schools. Around 700 jobs in construction were slashed. Some 200 jobs in arts, entertainment, and recreation were lost.

Retail, especially clothing and department stores, added 1,700 jobs — but that fell short of the average gain of 3,000 new retail jobs during the holiday season. Leisure and hospitality gained 500 jobs, restaurants and bars added another 500, and hotels added 200 jobs.

The big picture for the three-county area from December 2009 to December 2010 is sobering, with a total loss of 12,800 jobs, or 1.4 percent. The greatest losses occurred in finance, construction, transportation and utilities, government (especially schools), and health services. 

On a positive note, manufacturing recorded its first net gain — 100 jobs — since 2007.

On the whole, the Bay Area’s employment situation continues to look pretty grim. To all the job seekers out there: Good luck.

They have issues: Members of the new Board speak

Mary Magee
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20

Board President David Chiu touched off a broad political discussion in recent weeks with his statement that officials were elected “not to take positions, but to get things done.” Delivered just before his reelection as Board President with the solid backing of the board’s moderate faction, Chiu’s comment has been viewed in light of City Hall’s shifting political dynamic, a subject the Guardian explores in a Jan. 19 cover story. Politics aside, Chiu’s statement also begs the question: Just what do members of the board hope to get done, and how do they propose to accomplish the items on their agenda?
Last week, Guardian reporters tracked down every member of the board to find out. We asked, what are your top priorities? And how do you plan to achieve them? Some spoke with us for 25 minutes, and others spoke for just 5 minutes, but the result offers some insight into what’s on their radar. Not surprisingly, getting the budget right was mentioned by virtually everyone as a top priority, but there are sharp differences in opinion in terms of how to do that. Several supervisors, particularly those in the moderate wing, mentioned ballooning pension and healthcare costs. Aiding small business also emerged as a priority shared by multiple board members.

Sup. Eric Mar
District 1

Issues:
*Budget
*Assisting small businesses
*Programs and services for seniors
*Food Security
*Issues surrounding Golden Gate Park

Elected in 2008 to represent D1, Sup. Eric Mar has been named chair of the powerful Land Use & Economic Development Committee and vice chair of the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee.

Asked to name his top priorities, Mar said, “A humane budget that protects the safety net and services to the must vulnerable people in San Francisco is kind of the critical, top priority.”

It’s bound to be difficult, he added. “That’s why I wish it could have been a progressive that was chairing the budget process. Now, we have to work with Carmen Chu to ensure that it’s a fair, transparent process.”

A second issue hovering near the top of Mar’s agenda is lending a helping hand to the small businesses of the Richmond District. “There’s a lot of anxiety about the economic climate for small business. We’re trying to work closely with some of the merchant associations and come up with ideas on how the city government can be more supportive,” he said. Mar also spoke about the need to respond to the threat of big box stores, such as PetCo, that could move in and harm neighborhood merchants. “I’m worried about too many of the big box stores trying to come in with an urban strategy and saying that they’re different — but they sure have an unfair advantage,” he noted.

Programs and services for the senior population ranked high on his list. Mar noted that he’d been working with senior groups on how to respond to a budget analyst’s report showing a ballooning need for housing – especially affordable housing – for seniors. “It’s moving from the Baby Boom generation to the Senior Boomers, and I think the population, if I’m not mistaken, by 2020 it’s going up 50 percent,” he said. “It’s a huge booming population that I don’t think we’re ready to address.”

Addressing food security issues through the Food Security Task Force also ranked high on Mar’s list, and he noted that he’s been working with a coalition that includes UCSF and the Department of Public Health to study the problem. “We’ve had a number of strategy meetings already, but we’re trying to launch different efforts to create healthier food access in many of our lowest income neighborhoods,” Mar said.

Finally, Mar talked about issues relating to the park. “I do represent the district that has Golden Gate Park, so I’m often busy with efforts to preserve the park, prevent privatization, and ensure enjoyment for the many residents not just in the Richmond but throughout the city that enjoy the park.” Although it’s not technically in his district, Mar noted that he is very supportive of HANC Recycling Center – and plans to advocate on their behalf to Mayor Lee.

Sup. Mark Farrell
District 2
Issues:
*Pension reform
*Long-term economic plan for city
*Job creation
*Quality-of-life issues

Elected to replace termed-out D2 Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, Farrell has been named vice-chair of the Government Audits & Oversight Committee and a member of the Rules Committee. A native of D2, Farrell told the Guardian he believes his roots in the city and background as a venture capitalist would be an asset to the city’s legislative body. “I know at the last board, Carmen [Chu] was the only one who had any finance background,” he said. “To have someone come from the private sector with a business / finance background, I really do believe … adds to the dialogue and the discussion here at City Hall.”

Along those lines, Farrell said one of his top priorities is the budget. “I’m not on the budget and finance committee this time around, but given my background, I am going to play a role in that,” he said.

So what’s his plan for closing the budget deficit? In response, he alluded to slashing services. “In the past, there have been views that we as a city don’t provide enough services and we need to raise revenues to provide more, or the perspective that we first need to live within our means and then provide more services. Everyone’s going to disagree, but I’m in the latter camp,” he said. “I do believe we need to make some tough choices right now – whether it be head count, or whether it be looking at …pension reform. I do believe pension reform needs to be part of the dialogue. Unfortunately, it’s unsustainable.”

He also said he wanted to be part of “trying to create and focus on a framework for a long-term financial plan here in San Francisco.”

Secondly, Farrell discussed wanting to put together a “jobs bill.”

“Jobs is a big deal,” he said. “It’s something I want to focus on. There are only so many levers we can pull as a city. I think the biotech tax credits have spurred a lot of business down in Mission Bay.”

Next on Farrell’s agenda was quality-of-life issues, but rather than talk about enforcing San Francisco’s sit/lie ordinance – supported by political forces who organized under the banner of maintaining ‘quality-of-life’ – Farrell revealed that he is incensed about parking meter fines. “It is so strikingly unjust when you are 1 minute late to your parking meter and you have a $65 parking fine,” he said.

Farrell also mentioned development projects that would surely require time and attention. “CPMC is going to be a major dominant issue,” he said. He also mentioned Doyle Drive, and transitional age youth housing projects proposed in D2 – but as far as the housing project planned for the King Edward II Inn, which has generated some controversy among neighborhood groups, he didn’t take a strong position either way, saying he wanted to listen to all the stakeholders first.

Board President David Chiu
District 3
Issues:
*Budget
*Preserving neighborhood character
*Immigrant rights
*Preserving economic diversity
*Transit

Elected for a second two-year term as President of the Board, D3 Sup. David Chiu is rumored to be running in the mayor’s race, after he turned down former Mayor Gavin Newsom’s offer to appoint him as District Attorney. That offer was made after Kamala Harris won the state Attorney General’s race this fall. And when Chiu turned it down, former Mayor Gavin Newsom shocked just about everybody by appointing San Francisco Police Chief George Gascon, who is not opposed to the death penalty and was a longtime Republican before he recently registered as a Democrat, instead.

A temporary member of the Board’s Budget acommittee, Chiu is also a permanent member of the Board’s Government Audits & Oversight Committee.

Asked about his top priorities, Chiu spoke first and foremost about  “ensuring that we have a budget that works for all San Franciscans, particularly the most vulnerable.” He also said he wanted to see a different kind of budget process: “It is my hope that we do not engage in the typical, Kabuki-style budget process of years past under the last couple of mayors, where the mayor keeps under wraps for many months exactly what the thinking is on the budget, gives us something on June 1 for which we have only a couple of weeks to analyze, and then engage in the tired back-and-forth of debates in the past.” Chiu also spoke about tackling “looming pension and health care costs.”

Another priority, he said, was “Ensuring that our neighborhoods continue to remain the distinctive urban villages that they are, and protecting neighborhood character,” a goal that relates to “development, … historic preservation, [and] what we do around vacant commercial corridors.”

*Immigrant rights also made his top-five list. “I was very sad that last November we didn’t prevail in allowing all parents to have a right and a voice in school board elections,” he said, referencing ballot measure Proposition D which appeared on the November 2010 ballot. “I think we are going to reengage in discussion around Sanctuary City, another topic I have discussed twice already with Mayor Lee.”

Another issue for Chiu was  “ensuring again that hopefully San Francisco continues to remain an economically diverse city, and not just a city for the very wealthy.” He spoke about reforming city contracts: “In particular, dealing with the fact that in many areas, 70 to 80 percent of city contracts are awarded to non-San Francisco businesses. … I think there is more significant reform that needs to happen in our city contracting process.” Another economic-diversity measure, he said, was tax policy, “particularly around ensuring that our business tax is incenting the type of economic growth that we want.”

Finally, Chiu spoke about “Creating a transit-first city. This is not just about making sure MUNI is more reliable and has stable funding, but ensuring that we’re taking steps to reach a 2020 goal of 20 percent cycling in the city. Earlier this week I called for our transit agencies to look at pedestrian safety, because we are spending close to $300 million a year to deal with pedestrian deaths and injuries.”

Sup. Carmen Chu
District 4
*Budget
*Core Services
*Jobs
*Economy

Chiu has just named Sup. Carmen Chu as chair of the powerful Board and Finance Committee. And Chu, who worked as a budget analyst for Newsom’s administration, says the budget, core services, employment and the economy are her top priorities.

“My hope is that this year the budget is going to be a very collaborative and open process,” Chu said.

Chu believes workers benefits will be a central part of the budget-balancing debate.
“Any conversation about the long-term future of San Francisco’s budget has to look at the reality of where the bulk of our spending is,” she said.

Chu noted that the budget debate will have to take the state budget into account.
“At the end of the day, we need to take into account the context of the state budget, in terms of new cuts and taxes, because anything we do will be on top of the state level.

“We need to ask who do these measures really impact,” she added, noting that there were attempts to put revenue measures on the ballot last year.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi
District 5
* Local Hire / First Source / Reentry programs
* Budget / generating revenue
* Infrastructure improvements
*Reversing MTA service cuts

With only two years left to serve on the Board, D5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has been named chair of the Board’s Public Safety Committee and vice-chair of the Budget and Finance Committee.

“One of my top priorities is building on and strengthening the work that I’ve already done and that Avalos is doing on mandatory local hire and First Source programs,” Mirkarimi said. He also spoke about “strengthening reentry programs for those coming out of the criminal justice system, because we still have an enormously high recidivism rate.”

The budget also ranked high on Mirkarimi’s list, and he stressed the need for “doing surgical operations on our budget to make sure that services for the vulnerable are retained, and looking for other ways to generate revenue beyond the debate of what’s going on the ballot.

“For instance, I helped lead the charge for the America’s Cup, and while the pay-off from that won’t be realized for years, the deal still needs to be massaged. What we have now is an embryonic deal that still needs to be watched.”

Mirkarimi mentioned safeguarding the city against privatization, saying one of his priorities was “retooling our budget priorities to stop the escalating practice of privatizing city services.”

 He spoke about “ongoing work citywide to make mixed-use commercial and residential infrastructure improvements, which coincide with bicycle and pedestrian improvements.”

Finally, Mirkarimi said he wanted to focus on transportation issues. “As Chair of the Transportation Authority, if I even continue to be chair, to take the lead on signature transit projects and work with the M.T.A. to reverse service cuts.”

Sup. Jane Kim
District 6
Issues:
*Jobs
*Economic Development
*Small Business
*Pedestrian Safety
*Legislation to control bedbug infestations

Elected to replace termed-out D6 Sup. Chris Daly, Kim has been named chair of the Rules Committee and a member of the Budget & Finance committee.

Kim believes that she will prove her progressive values through her work and she’s trying to take the current debate about her allegiances on the Board in her stride.

“The one thing I learned from serving on the School Board was to be really patient,” Kim told me, when our conversation turned to the issue of “progressive values.”

“I didn’t want to be President of the School Board for the first few years, because I loved pushing the envelope,” Kim added, noting that as Board President David Chiu is in the often-unenviable position of chief negotiator between the Board and the Mayor.

But with Ed Lee’s appointment as interim mayor, Kim is excited about the coming year.
“There are a lot of new opportunities, a different set of players, and it’s going to be very interesting to learn how to traverse this particular scene.”

Kim is kicking off her first term on the Board with two pieces of legislation. The first seeks to address bedbug infestations. “Particularly around enforcement, including private landlords,” Kim said, noting that there have also been bedbug problems in Housing Authority properties.

Her second immediate goal is to look at pedestrian safety, a big deal in D6, which is traversed by freeways with off-ramps leading into residential zones.
“Pedestrian safety is a unifying issue for my district, particularly for all the seniors,” Kim said, citing traffic calming, speed limit enforcement and increased pedestrian traffic, as possible approaches.

Beyond those immediate goals, Kim plans to focus on jobs, economic development and small businesses in the coming year. “What can we do to create jobs and help small businesses? That is my focus, not from a tax reduction point of view, but how can we consolidate the permitting and fees process, because small businesses are a source of local jobs.”

Kim plans to help the Mayor’s Office implement Sup. John Avalos’ local hire legislation, which interim Mayor Ed Lee supports, unlike his predecessor Mayor Gavin Newsom.

“Everyone has always liked the idea of local hire, but without any teeth, it can’t be enforced,” Kim observed. “It’s heartbreaking that young people graduate out of San Francisco Unified School District and there’s been not much more than retail jobs available.”

She noted that jobs, land use and the budget are the three overarching items on this year’s agenda. “I’m a big believer in revenue generation, but government has to come half-way by being able to articulate how it will benefit people and being able to show that it’s more than just altruistic. I think we have to figure out that balance in promoting new measures. That’s why it’s important to be strong on neighborhood and community issues, so that folks feel like government is listening and helping them. I don’t think it’s a huge ask to be responsive to that.”

Kim said she hoped the new mayor would put out a new revenue measure, enforce local hire, and implement Sup. David Campos’ legislation to ensure due process for immigrant youth.

“I think Ed can take a lot of the goodwill and unanimous support,” Kim said. “We’ve never had a mayor without an election, campaigns, and a track record. Usually mayors come in with a group of dissenters. But he is in a very unique position to do three things that are very challenging to do. I hope raising revenues is one of those three. As a big supporter of local hire, I think it helps having a mayor that is committed to implement it. And I’m hoping that Ed will implement due process for youth. For me, it’s a no brainer and Ed’s background as a former attorney  for Asian Law Caucus is a good match. Many members of my family came to the U.S. as undocumented youth, so this is very personal. Kids get picked up for no reason and misidentified. People confuse Campos and Avalos, so imagine what happens to immigrant youth.”

Sup. Sean Elsbernd
District 7
Issues:
*Parkmerced
*Enforcing Prop G
*Pension & healthcare costs
*CalTrain

With two years left to serve on the Board, D7 Sup. Sean Elsbernd has been named vice-chair of the Rules Committee and a member of the City Operations & Neighborhood Services Committee. He was congratulated by Chinatown powerbroker Rose Pak immediately after the Board voted 11-0 to nominated former City Administrator Ed Lee as interim mayor, and during Lee’s swearing-in, former Mayor Willie Brown praised Elsbernd for nominating Lee for the job.

And at the Board’s Jan. 11 meeting before the supervisors voted for Lee, Elsbernd signaled that city workers’ retirement and health benefits will be at the center of the fight to balance the budget in the coming year.

Elsbernd noted that in past years, he was accused of exaggerating the negative impacts that city employees’ benefits have on the city’s budget. “But rather than being inflated, they were deflated,” Elsbernd said, noting that benefits will soon consume 18.14 percent of payroll and will account for 26 percent in three years. “Does the budget deficit include this amount?” he asked.

And at the afterparty that followed Lee’s swearing in, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who caused a furor last fall when he launched Measure B, which sought to reform workers’ benefits packages, told the Guardian he is not one to give up lightly. “We learned a lot from that,” Adachi said. “This is still the huge elephant in City Hall. The city’s pension liability just went up another 1 percent, which is another $30 million.”

As for priorities, Elsbernd broke it down into district, city, and regional issues. In D7, “Hands-down, without question the biggest issue … is Parkmerced,” he said, starting with understanding and managing the environmental approval process. If it gets approved, he said his top concerns was that “the tenant issue. And the overriding concern of if they sell, which I think we all think is going to happen in the near-term – do those guarantees go along with the land?”

Also related to Parkmerced was planning for the traffic conditions that the development could potentially create, which Elsbernd dubbed a “huge 19th Avenue issue.”

Citywide, Elsbernd’s top priorities included enforcing Proposition G – the voter-approved measure that requires MUNI drivers to engage in collective bargaining – and tackling pension and healthcare costs. He spoke about “making sure that MTA budget that comes to us this summer is responsive” to Prop G.

As for pension and healthcare, Elsbernd said, “I’ve already spent a good deal of time with labor talking about it, and will continue to do that.” But he declined to give further details. Asked if a revenue-generating measure could be part of the solution to that problem, Elsbernd said, “I’m not saying no to anything right now.”

On a regional level, Elsbernd’s priority was to help CalTrain deal with its crippling financial problem. He’s served on that board for the last four years. “The financial situation at CalTrain – it is without question the forgotten stepchild of Bay Area transit, and the budget is going to be hugely challenging,” he said. “I think they’ll survive, but I think they’re going to see massive reductions in services.”

Sup. Scott Wiener
District 8
Issues:
*Transportation
*Reasonable regulation of nightlife & entertainment industry
*Pension reform

Elected in November 2010 to replace termed-out D8 Sup. Bevan, Wiener has been named a temporary member of the Board’s Budget and Finance Committee and a permanent member of the Land Use and Economic Development Committee.

“Transportation is a top priority,” Wiener said. ‘That includes working with the M.T.A. to get more cabs on the street, and making sure that the M.T.A. collectively bargains effectively with its new powers, under Prop. G.”

“I’m also going to be focusing on public safety, including work around graffiti enforcement, though I’m not prepared to go public yet about what I’ll be thinking,” he said.

“Regulating nightlife and entertainment is another top priority,” Wiener continued. “I want to make sure that what we do is very thoughtful in terms of understanding the economic impacts, in terms of jobs and tax  revenues, that this segment has. With some of the unfortunate incidents that have happened, it’s really important before we jump to conclusions that we figure out what happened and why. Was it something the club did inappropriately, or was it just a fluke? That way, we can avoid making drastic changes across the board. I think we have been very reactive to some nightclub issues. I want us to be more thoughtful in taking all the factors into consideration.”

“Even if we put a revenue measure on the June or November ballot, we’d need a two-thirds majority, so realistically, it’s hard to envision successfully securing significant revenue measure before November 2012,” Wiener added. “And once you adopt a revenue measure, it takes time to implement it and revenue to come in, so it’s hard to see where we’ll get revenue that will impact the 2012 fiscal year. In the short term, for fiscal year 2011/2012, the horse is out of the barn”

“As for pension stuff, I’m going to be very engaged in that process and hopefully we will move to further rein in pension and retirement healthcare costs.”

Sup. David Campos
District 9
Issues:
*Good government
*Community policing
*Protecting immigrant youth
*Workers’ rights and healthcare

Elected in 2008, D9 Sup. David Campos has been named chair of the Board’s Government Audit & Oversight Committee and a member of the Public Safety Committee. And, ever since he declared that the progressive majority on the Board no longer exists, in the wake of the Board’s 11-0 vote for Mayor Ed Lee, Campos has found his words being used by the mainstream media as alleged evidence that the entire progressive movement is dead in San Francisco.

“They are trying to twist my words and make me into the bogey man,” Campos said, noting that his words were not a statement of defeat but a wake-up call.

“The progressive movement is very much alive,” Campos said. “The key here is that if you speak your truth, they’ll go after you, even if you do it in a respectful way. I didn’t lose my temper or go after anybody, but they are trying to make me into the next Chris Daly.”

Campos said his overarching goal this year is to keep advancing a good government agenda.

“This means not just making sure that good public policy is being pursued, but also that we do so with as much openness and transparency as possible,” he said.

As a member of the Board’s Public Safety Committee, Campos says he will focus on making sure that we have “as much community policing as possible.

He plans to focus on improving public transportation, noting that a lot of folks in his district use public transit.

And he’d like to see interim mayor Ed Lee implement the due process legislation that Campos sponsored and the former Board passed with a veto-proof majority in 2009, but Mayor Gavin Newsom refused to implement. Campos’ legislation sought to ensure that immigrant youth get their day in court before being referred to the federal immigration authorities for possible deportation, and Newsom’s refusal to implement it, left hundreds of youth at risk of being deported, without first having the opportunity to establish their innocence in a juvenile court.
‘We met with Mayor Lee today,” Campos told the Guardian Jan. 18. “And we asked him to move this forward as quickly as possible. He committed to do that and said he wants to get more informed, but I’m confident he will move this forward.”

Campos also said he’ll be focusing on issues around workers’ rights and health care.
“I want to make sure we keep making progress on those fronts,” Campos said.

“It’s been a rough couple of days,” Campos continued, circling back to the beating the press gave him for his “progressive” remarks.“But I got to keep moving, doing my work, calling it as a I see it, doing what’s right, and doing it in a respectful way. The truth is that if you talk about the progressive movement and what we have achieved, which includes universal healthcare and local hire in the last few years, you are likely to become a target.”

Sup. Malia Cohen
District 10
Issues:
*Public safety
*Jobs
*Preserving open space
*Creating Community Benefit Districts
*Ending illegal dumping
Elected to replace termed-out D10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell, Cohen has been named chair of the City & School District committee, vice chair of the Land Use and Economic Development Committee and vice chair of the Public Safety Committee.

Cohen says her top priorities are public safety, jobs, open space, which she campaigned on, as well as creating community benefits districts and putting an end to illegal dumping.

“I feel good about the votes I cast for Ed Lee as interim mayor and David Chiu as Board President. We need to partner on the implementation of local hire, and those alliances can help folks in my district, including Visitation Valley.”

“I was touched by Sup. David Campos words about the progressive majority on the Board,” she added. “I thought they were thoughtful.”

Much like Kim, Cohen believes her legislative actions will show where her values lie.
“I’d like to see a community benefits district on San Bruno and Third Street because those are two separate corridors that could use help,” Cohen said. 

She pointed to legislation that former D10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell introduced in November 2010, authorizing the Department of Public Works to expend a $350,000 grant from the Solid Waste Disposal Clean-Up Site trust fund to clean up 25 chronic illegal dumping sites.
“All the sites are on public property and are located in the southeast part of the city, in my district,” Cohen said, noting that the city receives over 16,000 reports of illegal dumping a year and spends over $2 million in cleaning them up.

Sup. John Avalos
District 11
*Implementing Local Hire
*Improving MUNI / Balboa Park BART
*Affordable housing
*Improving city and neighborhood services

Sup. John Avalos, who chaired the Budget committee last year and has just been named Chair of the Board’s City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee, said his top priorities were implementing local hire, improving Muni and Balboa Park BART station, building affordable housing at Balboa, and improving city and neighborhood services.

“And despite not being budget chair, I’ll make sure we have the best budget we can,” Avalos added, noting that he plans to talk to labor and community based organizations about ways to increase city revenues. “But it’s hard, given that we need a two-thirds majority to pass stuff on the ballot,” he said.

Last year, Avalos helped put two measures on the ballot to increase revenues. Prop. J sought to close loopholes in the city’s current hotel tax, and asked visitors to pay a slightly higher hotel tax (about $3 a night) for three years. Prop. N, the real property transfer tax, h slightly increased the tax charged by the city on the sale of property worth more than $5 million.

Prop. J secured only 45.5 percent of the vote, thereby failing to win the necessary two-thirds majority. But it fared better than Prop. K, the competing hotel tax that Newsom put on the ballot at the behest of large hotel corporations and that only won 38.5 percent of the vote. Prop. K also sought to close loopholes in the hotel tax, but didn’t include a tax increase, meaning it would have contributed millions less than Prop. J.

But Prop. N did pass. “And that should raise $45 million,” Avalos said. “So, I’ve always had my sights set on raising revenue, but making cuts is inevitable.”

The problem with parking tickets

Zelda Bronstein
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63
The problem with parking tickets

Naturally, C.W. Nevius is outraged that the poor drivers in San Francisco are going to get hit with more parking tickets since the Municipal Transportation Agency has a budget shortfall. We’re going to hear the usual whining form the cars-have-rights-too crowd; why is everybody always picking on the owners of internal combustion vehicles? I mean, they pollute the air and are destroying the planet, but paying for the right to drive in a city is such a horrible oppresive burden. 


But here’s the thing: In this case, I don’t thing Nevius and the gang are entirely wrong.


Parking tickets were never meant to be primarily a revenue source. If you ask any rational urban planner or transporation expert, they’ll tell you that parking meter rates should be designed to encourage turnover of spaces and fines should be used to discourage illegal parking. In a perfect urban setting, the parking fines would be adequate to keep everyone following the rules, and there would be no revenue from tickets at all.


You start depending on illegal behavior as a source of revenue and you get into trouble fast. You get to the point where the city wants you to break the law so there will be enough money to pay for Muni service. Which makes no sense.


The system is also utterly unfair. Some people will never get parking tickets in San Francisco — because they have garages where they live (and garages seriously jack up the cost of housing) and garages where they work (and subsidized parking is an untaxed benefit for the few that harms society as a whole) and large parking lots where they shop (which encourages people to use big chain stores instead of neighborhood merchants.) Those people who never get tickets do just as much damage to the environment — and pay nothing for it.


In the end, parking fines are a somewhat regressive source of revenue. The very rich either don’t pay them or don’t care (in which case the deterrent is missing). Companies that do a lot of deliveries in congested parts of the city just factor the tickets into the cost of doing business — which means the drivers have no reason not to double-park. The average person who is five minutes late to pick the kids at child care (and is getting a $1 a minute penalty for being late; that’s standard in this city) and in desperation sticks the damn car in a yellow zone for just a couple of seconds and gets caught — that person is paying the cost of everyone else’s bad behavior.


But there’s no question that cars have serious negative impacts on the city, and San Franciscans shouldn’t be subsidizing their use. In fact, car users should be subsidizing Muni, big time. It just ought to be fair.


So for once, I’m with Nevius: Let’s use parking fines to discourage illegal parking, free up spaces and stop the damn double-parkers, who screw up everything, particularly Muni service (ever watch a trolley coach try to pull around a double-parked delivery truck downtown?). But when it comes to MTA revenue, we should try to go for a single, annual, progressive car tax. And it should be based on the value of the car.


You own and operate a $50,000 car in San Francisco? Costs you $500 a year in city taxes. Your car’s a 15-year-old beater worth $5,000? Pay $50. Yes, some people will cheat and pretend to live in Berkeley (although once we make this work, every other Bay Area city’s going to join us). Some people always cheat. If they get caught, their car gets towed and impounded. Most people will pay the tax.


Oh, and the neighborhood parking stickers need to be fixed. It costs, what, $300 a month to rent a garage these days — and for $70 A YEAR, you get the equivalent of a city-owned parking space on the street, all yours, all the time. That should be at least doubled. Then in exchange we can cut back on the street sweeping in neighborhoods.


I’ve always suspected that the city’s street-cleaning program was largely a post-Prop.13 way of raising revenue by taxing the people who are well enough off to own a car but not rich enought to have a garage. Sure, the city needs to clean Mission Street three times a week, but where I work, in Potrero Hill, the streets would be fine with a monthly sweeping. Save the city some money, too.


Owning a car in the city should be expensive. But the taxes ought to be fair. That’s all I’m saying.


 


 


 

2010 Offies!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
2010 Offies!

tredmond@sfbg.com

When a major conservative political movement starts using a name that typically refers to the act of scrotal fellatio, you know it’s morning again in America. In 2010, the teabaggers came home. They nominated candidates who think masturbation is selfish and wonder why monkeys aren’t still evolving into humans. They held rallies urging the government to “get out of my Medicare,” which happens to be a government program. Their leaders praised dictators and urged women who had been raped to look at the bright side of things.

And those were just the headlines.

It’s hard to imagine a year that could be worse than 2010 — but it was a great vintage for the Offies.

Presenting the Off Guard awards for the silliest, most insane, and absolute worst of the year that was.

AND SHE FIGURES IF WE ARREST EVERYONE WITH BROWN SKIN, WE CAN FINALLY GET THIS SORT OF BEHAVIOR UNDER CONTROL

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer told reporters that illegal immigration resulted in beheadings in the desert.

BUT AS LONG AS YOU DON’T TOUCH YOURSELF WHEN YOU THINK OF THE DEVIL, IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY

Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware who decried masturbation as a “selfish act,” said she only dabbled in witchcraft and had just one date on a satanic altar.

EXCEPT THAT WE ALREADY ARE, AND WE ALREADY ARE

Jerry Brown said he opposed the state’s marijuana legalization measure because “we can’t compete with China if we’re all stoned.”

LOOK BUSY

A Pew Research Center poll showed that 41 percent of Americans think Jesus will return in the next 40 years.

HEY, IF WE’D JUST CREATED THE WORST ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER OF THE DECADE, WE’D WANT A LITTLE BREAK, TOO

A few days after the worst oil spill in U.S. history, BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward complained that he wanted his life back.

BUT HE SWEARS HE’LL STOP AT BEHEADINGS

Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said if he were governor he’d give the National Guard live ammunition to shoot at immigrants on the border.

AFTER ALL, IF THEY’RE NOT IN AN AIRPLANE, THEY CAN’T DO ANY DAMAGE

GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina said that people on the federal no-fly list should have the right to own guns.

OOH, WHEN YOU TALK TOUGH LIKE THAT YOU ALMOST SOUND LIKE SOMEONE WHO COULD STAND UP TO THE REPUBLICANS. OR MAYBE NOT

President Obama asked whose ass he should kick at BP.

IT’S OKAY, THOUGH, AS LONG AS THEY WEREN’T ENGAGING IN ANY SELFISH ACTS

Staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission got caught spending as much as eight hours a day downloading porn at the office.

AND SOMETIMES GOP CANDIDATES ARE NITWITS

Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle praised Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for his efforts to privatize that country’s retirement system, saying “sometimes dictators have good ideas.”

YEAH, COME ON, WHY CAN’T YOU LOOK AT THE BRIGHT SIDE OF THINGS?

Sharron Angle said that women who have become pregnant as the result of rape or incest should “turn lemons into lemonade.”

DAMN GUMMINT TRYING TO INTERFERE WITH PRIVATE BIDNESS

GOP Congressman Joe Barton of Texas apologized to BP for a White House “shakedown.”

YES, AS A MATTER OF FACT I DO OWN THE WHOLE GODDAM SCHOOL

Meg Whitman’s son threw softball equipment over a fence to kick a group of computer science and physics students off the Princeton rugby field.

NICE, SINCE THOSE GROUPS ALL GOT ALONG SO WELL

GOP Senate candidate Chuck DeVore compared Palestinian activists to Nazis, Fascists, and Communists.

AND OF COURSE, THAT WORKS SO WELL WITH MODERN MANAGED CARE

Nevada banned chicken costumes from the polls after Nevada Senate candidate Sue Lowden said that people should barter with doctors for health care the way “our grandparents would bring a chicken to the doctor.”

ANOTHER GREAT MOMENT IN THEOLOGY FROM THE MAN WHO BROUGHT YOU THE PEDOPHILE PRIEST COVER UP

Pope Benedict said it was okay for male prostitutes to wear condoms.

SO HE’S GOT THAT GOING FOR HIM. WHICH IS NICE

Formerly classified State Department cables revealed that the premier of Korea is still an excellent drinker.

ACTUALLY, THEY TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE TEA PARTY AND DECIDED THEY WERE BETTER OFF AS THEY ARE

Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell said that evolution was a myth; after all, she wondered, “why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?”

THE CHURCH HAS ALWAYS BEEN KNOWN FOR ITS SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE

The Vatican announced that the ordination of women and the abuse of children were both “grave crimes.”

THAT’S OKAY, IT WILL LOOK GOOD ON HIS RESUME

Gavin Newsom decided to run for lieutenant governor after saying he didn’t know what the job was.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK, CIA EDITION

The United States held high-level negotiations with a supposedly senior Taliban operative who turned out to be a Pakistani shopkeeper.

BUT WAIT — HOW WILL WE KNOW IF WE’RE SUPPOSED TO WORRY OR NOT?

The Department of Homeland Security abandoned color-coded safety alerts.

THE INTELLIGENCE AND CULTURAL TASTE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IS SIMPLY STAGGERING

Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, made it to the final round of Dancing with the Stars.

WHICH MAKES HIM ENTIRELY QUALIFIED TO SERVE AS A REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN

Dan Quayle’s son ran for Congress in Arizona and admitted that he had been posting on “dirty Scottsdale” under the name of Brock Landers, a sidekick to porn star Dirk Diggler.

IS HE ONE OF THE NAZI FASCIST COMMUNISTS, TOO?

Rand Paul said Obama’s criticism of BP was “un-American.”

WAIT — WAS THAT A BROWN ALERT?

The California Highway Patrol shut down its South Lake Tahoe office after officers found an anal vibrator and thought it was a bomb.

HONESTY IS JUST PART OF THE PROCESS OF RECOVERY

Tiger Woods admitted that he sucked.

EXCEPT THAT IT MOSTLY BENEFITS THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY

Vice President Joe Biden called the health reform bill “a big fucking deal.”

IT’S THOSE CUTE WOODEN SHOES, YOU SEE

NATO Commander John Sheehan said Dutch soldiers were too gay.

DAMN, AND HE’S SUCH AN ATTRACTIVE MAN. I’M SURE THE TSA FOLKS WERE REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO IT

John Tyner told Transportation Security Administration officials in San Diego that if “you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.”

AND HE WASN’T EVEN TALKING ABOUT HER

Sarah Palin demanded that Rahm Emanuel apologize for using the term “fucking retarded.”

 

SINCE WE ALL KNOW THOSE PEOPLE DON’T KNOW HOW TO SPEAK IN PUBLIC

MSNBC Host Chris Matthews was so excited by an Obama speech that he said he “forgot he was black.”

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spent $50 million on a ballot initiative to stop public power, and lost after getting soundly defeated in every county where the utility has customers.

YOU MAY BE PART OF THE FAMILY, BUT WHEN IT COMES TO MY POLITICAL CAREER, HONEY, YOU’RE OUT THE DOOR

Meg Whitman fired her housekeeper when she found out she was in the country illegally.

BUT THEY’RE ALIKE ANYWAY, RIGHT?

Sharron Angle defended a campaign ad depicting menacing-looking Hispanic men by telling members of the Hispanic Student Union at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that many of the members looked Asian.

OF COURSE, SHE SKIPPED THE FIRST FEW AMENDMENTS — BOOORING!

Christine O’Donnell said she couldn’t find anything about the separation of church and state in the Constitution.

BECAUSE IN A FIREFIGHT, THE FIRST THING ANYONE WOULD BE THINKING ABOUT IS HIS SERGEANT’S CUTE ASS

Sen. John McCain said he opposed ending “don’t ask, don’t tell,” talked about all the soldiers and Marines who lost limbs, and said that “when your life is on the line, you don’t want anything distracting.”

SINCE WE ALL KNOW THAT HEALTH INSURANCE MAKES YOUR PEE SMELL FUNNY

Federal judge Henry Hudson asked Obama administration officials whether the new health care plan was similar to forcing all Americans to eat asparagus.

SO IT’S JUST AS WELL THOSE PEOPLE ON THE NO-FLY LIST HAVE THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS

Sharron Angle said that the Obama administration’s policies might require “Second Amendment solutions.”

IT’S PERFECTLY FINE FOR HOMOSEXUALS TO ATTEND MARRIAGE CEREMONIES, AS LONG AS THEY’RE JUST THE HIRED HELP

Sir Elton John played at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding.

SURE, GREAT FUN. JUST LIKE SHOOTING YOUR FRIENDS WITH A HUNTING RIFLE

Dick Cheney said he had been a “big supporter of water boarding.”

DAMN, SUPERVISOR, THE OFFIES WILL MISS YOU

Chris Daly vowed to say “fuck” at every single board meeting in 2010.

Progressive supervisors block mayoral appointments

Sasha Cuttler
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15

UPDATED: Progressives on the Board of Supervisors have finally started to push back on Mayor Gavin Newsom for his petulant refusal to vacate Room 200 unless his conditions for choosing a successor mayor are met, with the Rules Committee today blocking nine [UPDATE: seven] of 10 of the mayor’s committee and commission appointments.

Led by Sups. David Campos and Eric Mar, the three-member committee has been voting to continue consideration of the appointees to a future date at the discretion of Chairman Campos, even those who they voice support for. But they are trying to force a more equitable approach to governing the city during this transition period. The meeting is ongoing at this writing and can be viewed live here.

The one exception so far has been San Francisco Public Utilities Commission appointee Vince Courtney, with Mar and Campos voicing the urgency of filling the appointment on a body that is now moving forward Clean Power SF and other important initiatives. But they have blocked the appointment of Andrew Wolfram, Richard Johns, and Karl Kasz to the Historic Preservation Commission, Harry Kim and Herb Cohn to the Relocation Appeals Board, Florence Kong to the City Hall Preservation Advisory Board, Leona Bridges to the Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors, and Michael Kim and Leslie Katz to the Port Commission.

Former Sup. Amos Brown lashed out at the move, telling the committee, “I’m appalled to witness what’s happening here.”

But progressives have been equally appalled at Newsom for delaying today’s scheduled swearing in as lieutenant governor, reportedly to Jan. 10 after the new board is sworn in, and for demanding that the supervisors guarantee him that they will only support one of his preferred moderate caretakers for the interim mayor position. Newsom’s office did not return a Guardian call for comment on today’s meeting.

UPDATE 1:25 PM: After hearing more than an hour’s worth of testimony in support of Bridges, the committee unanimously voted to recommend her nomination to the MTA, citing that agency’s urgent need for a nominee from the African-American community who has a strong financial management background. The full board will consider her nomination tomorrow.

UPDATE 2:20 PM: Shortly before adjourning, the committee also unanimously recommended Katz be appointed to the Port Commission, saying that agency urgently needs another good appointee, although Mar indicated he didn’t think Kim was right for the position and that nomination was continued.

School kids and Muni

Zelda Bronstein
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6
School kids and Muni

So SFUSD just decided to cut half of its school bus routes (including, I believe, one that my son sometimes takes to Aptos Middle School). I should be outraged — but I’m not. Jerry Brown has made it clear that even if he raises taxes, it’s going to be an ugly year for schools and everyone else, and I’d rather see cuts in transportation than in teachers and classes.


But if this is the approach, then the city and the school district need to do a better job coordinating around Muni.


Elementary school kids shouldn’t be on Muni; I’d save the school bus routes for them. But older kids can use the city system, and many do — and more would, if it were just a little easier.


My son often takes Muni after school — to the library, to his Tae Kwon Do class — and soon I’ll let him ride the bus home. But to buy him a youth pass, I have to take him personally to a Muni pass outlet, once every month, and it’s a pain. I understand why they won’t sell me a youth pass for my kid; I could cheat (well, nobody would really believe I was under 18, sigh; I don’t even get carded in bars). But why don’t they sell youth passes in the schools? 


It would be pretty simple: Muni issues a number of youth passes to each middle school and high school, the schools sell them out of the office and hand kids Muni maps with routes near the school marked off. I can use Nextbus to tell my son when to head out to the bus stop; there’s no reason the schools couldn’t do that, too. Post the schedules; sell the passes. Maybe even change a few Muni routes to make them more convenient for students.


It seems silly for a city as geographically small as San Francisco to have two parallel transportation systems. With a little creativity Muni could work for the schools, too. 

Hiring at home

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Hiring at home

sarah@sfbg.com

The lame duck Board of Supervisors made history Dec. 7 when it voted 8-3 to approve mandatory local hire legislation for city-funded construction projects. The measure ends a decade-long effort to reach 50 percent local hiring goals through good-faith efforts.

“That’s a sea change in our local hiring discussion,” said Sup. John Avalos, who launched the legislation in October as part of the LOCAL-SF (Local Opportunities for Communities and Labor) campaign, which seeks to strengthen local hiring, address high unemployment rates, and boost the local economy.

The veto-proof passage of Avalos’ measure comes in the wake of a city-commissioned study indicating that San Francisco has failed to meet good-faith local hiring goals for public works projects even as unemployment levels rise in the local construction industry and several local neighborhoods face concentrated poverty.

Although Cleveland also has a local-hire law, the Avalos measure will be the strongest in the nation. Avalos’ legislative aide Raquel Redondiez told the Guardian that Cleveland’s 2003 legislation requires 20 percent local hire.

“This legislation doesn’t just have a mandated 50 percent goal,” Avalos explained, noting that San Francisco will require that each trade achieve a mandated rate and that 50 percent of apprentices be residents.

“This will ensure that our tax dollars get recycled back into the local economy, and that San Franciscans who are ready to work are provided the opportunity to do so,” Avalos said.

Avalos’ groundbreaking legislation phases in mandatory requirements that a portion of San Francisco public works jobs go to city residents and includes additional targets for hiring disadvantaged workers.

 

WHO GETS $25 BILLION?

The legislation replaces the city’s First Source program, under which contractors were required only to make good faith efforts to hire 50 percent local residents on publicly-funded projects. But the measure begins slowly by mandating levels some contractors are already reaching. According to a study commissioned by the city’s Office of Employment and Workforce Development and released in October, 20 percent of work hours on publicly-funded construction projects are going to San Francisco residents.

Avalos’ legislation, which is supported by a broad coalition of labor and community groups including PODER, the Filipino Community Center, Southeast Jobs Coalition, Kwan Wo Ironworks Inc., Rubecon, and Chinese for Affirmative Action, comes at a critical moment for the recession-battered construction industry.

Under the city’s capital plan, more than $25 billion will be spent on public works and other construction projects in the next decade — and two-thirds of this money will be spent over the next five years.

The measure has environmental benefits too. Transportation still accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions generated in the Bay Area than any other source, and San Francisco residents are more likely to take transit, walk, or bike to work than residents of other Bay Area counties. “When local citizens are able to work locally, there are fewer cars on the road and less air pollution,” Avalos said.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi said that Avalos’ legislation is “just a start.”

“People have talked a good game about local hiring,” observed Mirkarimi, whose district includes the high unemployment-affected Western Addition.

“We are going to have to go beyond construction and start thinking about delving into the private sector,” Mirkarimi continued, pointing to the need to build 100,000 housing units over the next 25 years if the city is to keep up with a projected population increase. “Who is going to build that housing?” he asked.

Sup. Eric Mar noted that “the Sierra Club endorsed the measure early on because of the environmental benefits of having people work close to where they live.”

Sup. David Campos, whose district includes the Mission, said the measure was one of the most significant pieces of legislation to emerge from the board in recent years. “In the past, a lot of obstacles got in the way, including some legal challenges,” said Campos, who credited Avalos for navigating a complicated legal structure. “At the end of the day, I think this is going to benefit everyone.”

Mike Theriault, secretary-treasurer for the San Francisco Building Trades Council, told the Guardian he remains opposed to the legislation because the union presers to allocate jobs based on seniority, not residency. But he said the amendments make the measure “less harmful and more survivable in the short-term.”

 

THE ECONOMIC GAP

Termed-out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who represents the city’s economically distressed southeast sector, has often noted that the construction industry provides a path to the middle class for people without advanced degrees or facing barriers to employment. She thanked Avalos for pushing legislation that promises to provides opportunities for “growing the middle class instead of importing it.”

“This industry closes the economic gap,” she said.

Board President David Chiu and termed-out Sups. Chris Daly and Bevan Dufty also supported Avalos legislation. But Dufty, who is running in the 2011 mayoral race, cast the eighth vote, which gave the measure a veto-proof majority.

The board’s Dec. 7 vote came a few hours after Bayview-based Aboriginal Blacks United founder James Richards and a score of unemployed local residents rallied at City Hall in the hopes of securing Dufty’s vote.

ABU has recently been protesting at UCSF’s Mission Bay hospital buildings site on 16th and Third streets. Its members also triggered a shut down at the Sunset Reservoir last month after a court ruled that locals promised jobs installing solar panels at the plant be replaced by higher-skilled engineers,

“It’s been too long that we have been protesting and fighting this good faith effort,” Richards told the Guardian. “We need a mandatory policy.”

Dufty is also hoping the Avalos measure could spread to other cities and benefit workers nationwide. “At a certain point I looked at labor and said, ‘Yes, I’m going for this legislation. But not just for San Francisco — you want to take this concept to other cities,’ ” Dufty said, as he made good on his promise to Richards to vote to support Avalos’ law.

Dufty seemed hopeful that Mayor Gavin Newsom would get behind the legislation. “But I respect that there may be a little bit of coming together between now and the second reading.”

Newsom spokesman Tony Winniker told the Guardian that the mayor has 10 days to review Avalos’ legislation after its Dec. 14 second reading. “He supports stronger local hire requirements but does want to review the many amendments that were added before deciding,” Winnicker said.

But will Newsom, who is scheduled to be sworn in as California’s next lieutenant governor Jan. 3, issue a veto on or before Christmas Eve on legislation that has been amended to address the stated concerns of the building trades?

That would be ironic since the amended legislation appears to match recommendations that the Mayor’s Taskforce on African American Outmigration published in 2009. The California Department of Finance projected that San Francisco’s black population would continue to decline from 6.5 percent (according to 2005 census data) to 4.6 percent of the city’s total population by 2050 — in part because of a lack of good jobs.

 

WILL NEWSOM VETO?

Avalos originally proposed to start at 30 percent and reach 50 percent over three years. But after the building trades complained that these levels were unworkable, Avalos amended the legislation to require an initial mandatory participation level of 20 percent of all project work-hours within each trade performed by local residents, with no less than 10 percent of all project work-hours within each trade to be performed by disadvantaged workers.

He also amended his legislation to require that this mandatory level be increased annually over seven years in 5 percent increments up to 50 percent, with no less than 25 percent within each trade to be performed by disadvantaged workers in the legislation’s sixth year.

A Dec. 1 report from city economist Ted Egan estimated that the local hire legislation would create 350 jobs and cost the city $9 million annually. But Egan clarified for the Guardian that this cost equals only 1 percent of the city’s spending on public works in any given year.

Vincent Pan of Chinese Affirmative Action, which supports Avalos’ local hiring policy, suggested that the mayor “check the temperature.”

“It would be leadership on the part of the mayor not to veto legislation that’s about San Francisco,” Pan said.

And Mindy Kener, an organizing member of the Southeast Jobs Coalition breathed a deep sigh of relief when Dufty’s vote made the law veto-proof. “It’s gonna go across the country,” Kener said. “We just made history.”

Bikes are not cars

Zelda Bronstein
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39
Bikes are not cars

Okay, first of all, this is ridiculous. California cities are supposed to be encouraging people to ride bikes instead of cars. And bikes aren’t 3,000-pound metal devices propelled forward with internal combustion engines; yes, a bike can hit a pedestrian, but the likelihood of fatal injuries isn’t that high. Certainly not compared to cars.


Besides, and here’s the thing that really gets me: This kid gets a ticket for running a stop sign on his bicycle and “now he has to go to traffic school to keep a moving violation off his driver’s license.”


How is that possible? You don’t need a license to ride a bike. A bike isn’t a car; the skills are entirely different. The risks are entirely different. You can ride a bike before you turn 16. You can ride without proof of citizenship. You don’t have to give up a fingerprint or fill out forms or take a test to ride a bike.


So why should you face a violation on your license to drive a car when you’re not driving a car? Should I get a point on my driver’s license if I sit on the sidewalk, or walk against the light, or block traffic in a political protest? Those things aren’t remotely related to driving a motor vehicle.


I got stopped once by a cop for (allegedly) running a stop sign, and he asked to see my driver’s license, and I (politely) said: Why? I’m not driving a car. I’m happy to provide ID, but I don’t need to present a document from the California Department of MOTOR vehicles when I’m not operating a MOTOR vehicle. Especially when I’m making the world a cleaner, better place with my transportation choice.


Oddly enough, he agreed. We had a pleasant talk about bicycle safety and he let me go. You’d think the UC cops would have better things to do.

Class of 2010: Scott Wiener

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Class of 2010: Scott Wiener

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Scott Wiener, who is 40, gay, soft-spoken, and remarkably tall, seems to have made an impression on voters with his successful campaign for District 8 (the Castro, Noe Valley) supervisor. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, several patrons of a Market Street café stopped to say hello and congratulate him. “I saw millions of signs about you!” one exclaimed.

A deputy city attorney, Wiener claimed one of the most decisive victories among contenders vying for seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He’s more fiscally conservative than Rafael Mandelman, who was his progressive opponent in the race, and is more in step politically with Mayor Gavin Newsom than San Francisco progressives. Yet Wiener stressed to the Guardian that he should ultimately be viewed as an independent thinker. “For me, it’s about having mutual respect for everyone,” he said. “Even if you disagree on some issues, and even if you disagree on a lot of issues, you can always find areas of agreement.”

Asked about his priorities in office, Wiener put public transit at the top of the list. Over the next few decades, the population of San Francisco and the Bay Area will dramatically increase, he said. “And at the same time, we’ve been underfunding public transportation, and particularly our roads. It could potentially be a catastrophe if we’re not able to not just keep the system as it is, but actually expand it. That is a really big priority.” To raise money for Muni, he doesn’t support extending parking meter hours, but does support a local vehicle license fee. There’s some question surrounding that prospect since California voters approved Proposition 26, which requires a two-thirds majority vote for fees. But Wiener said he wanted to be involved in efforts to implement a VLF in San Francisco.

Another priority is finding ways to stimulate job growth. He approves of the city’s move to use a tax credit for biotech industry businesses as a means of encouraging job creation, but said that mechanism should be used sparingly since it creates a revenue hole. Instead, Wiener said he was more in favor of looking at payroll-tax reform — but only if it doesn’t result in a tax increase.

Wiener also places importance on supporting the city’s Entertainment Commission and preserving San Francisco’s vibrant nightlife. “That’s an issue that I’ve always worked on and I’ll be speaking at [the California Music and Culture Association] next Friday, which I’m hoping will become a really effective voice for that community,” Wiener noted. “It needs a really unified and strong voice. and I want to make sure that we are really prioritizing having a vibrant nightlife and outdoor festival scene, and that we’re not blaming the entertainment community for societal ills like gun violence.” He also mentioned bolstering the Entertainment Commission’s budget.

But might that pro nightlife stance place him at odds with the San Francisco Police Department? “In some ways, I’m from a public-safety background,” he said in response. “I’ve been involved in a lot of safety issues on a neighborhood level. I’ve worked closely with SFPD and I am supportive of Chief [George] Gascon. In a way, I think that gives me some credibility.”

Speaking of working closely with people, whom does Wiener see himself forming alliances with on the new board? “I definitely have a great relationship with Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu, and I will be working closely with them. But I don’t agree with them on everything,” he said. Board President David Chiu and Sup. David Campos were both his classmates at Harvard, he noted, so he feels confident in his ability to work with them even if they don’t always see eye to eye. “One thing I see about this board that I’m optimistic about is that I think it’s going to be a more collegial board,” he added.

On the question on everyone’s mind — who will succeed Mayor Gavin Newsom to serve as the interim mayor? — Wiener said he thinks the best idea is to appoint a caretaker mayor. “Next year’s going to be really hard year,” he said and a caretaker mayor could “help make some really hard choices that need to be made. I may not like all of those choices, but they can do something that someone who’s a brand new mayor seeking reelection may be timid about doing.”

Who might he support if the new board selects the successor mayor? “There are some really solid names that have been bandied about, like [San Francisco Public Utilities Director] Ed Harrington or [Sherriff] Mike Hennessey,” he replied.

Wiener’s going to be mostly a fiscal conservative when it comes to the budget. Any new revenue, he said, “should be very policy-based,” for example transit-oriented instead of raising business taxes.

And he has plenty of cuts in mind, including “the way we contract for nonprofits,” looking at shared overhead, and consolidation. He also said that “we need to continue moving forward with pension and benefit reform [and] aggressively address overtime in all departments.” And what can voters expect from Sup. Scott Wiener that’s different from Sup. Bevan Dufty, a mayoral hopeful who currently represents D8? Wiener didn’t go too far out on a limb on that one. “There have been some tenant issues that Bevan voted against and I supported,” he said. “We’ve had times where he’s been to my left, or I’ve been to his left, but I can’t speculate as to the future. It’s going to be case by case.” *

Boring through

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Boring through

news@sfbg.com

Despite an official groundbreaking ceremony last February, the Central Subway — an underground Muni connection to Chinatown — still doesn’t have its full $1.5 billion in funding lined up yet, and now the project is facing renewed criticism that the high cost isn’t worth the benefits.

The project was a promise by former Mayor Willie Brown to Chinatown leaders who were upset that the Embarcadero Freeway was torn down after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and never rebuilt, leaving that densely populated part of town difficult to access. But not everyone in Chinatown wants the project.

Wilma Pang, founder and co-chair of A Better Chinatown Tomorrow (ABCT) stands firmly against it, while the Rev. Norman Fong, deputy director of programs for the Chinatown Community Development Center, takes a solid stand for building the project, as does Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, who represents the district.

Fong explains that the majority of Chinatown has united to make sure the subway comes through, and that he himself has never seen the community in Chinatown more set on something. “This is an environmental justice movement,” Fong said. “For me, this was the first time Chinatown had ever fought [for such a major infrastructure project].”

City staff is also focused on moving the project forward. “This project has been supported by our state, local, and federal officials,” Brajah Norris, external affairs manager for the Central Subway Project, told the Guardian.

But the group SaveMuni — formed last year by progressives, transit engineers, transit advocates, and other activists “working to reverse Muni’s death spiral” — recently called for the Central Subway to be shelved and its resources put to more efficient projects. “Now that the analysis has been done, it’s time to rethink the situation,” SaveMuni says in a white paper on the Central Subway.

The group argues that using the subway will take longer than other transit options, threatens many businesses on Stockton Street, and doesn’t even connect effectively with the Muni system. Even worse, they point out that Muni would have to spend an additional $4 million a year in local operating expenditures beyond the existing bus service, an expenditure that seems unnecessary to the organization members.

Although creating a subway for the crowded community seemed like a good idea initially, people like Tom Radulovich soon began to realize that a 1.7 mile subway stretch buried 20 feet underground is not the same as the plan he hoped for when considering an economically efficient transportation system for the people in Chinatown.

“People deserve a whole range of alternatives,” said Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and an elected member of the BART Board of Directors. “You have to be mindful of when the [current] project is not the same project you voted for.”

For those at SaveMuni, the project long ago strayed from its original goal. Although they agree that Chinatown community members deserve their own form of reliable transportation, they believe this is not the right way to be spending federal, state, and local money.

“It’s an important corridor, so funding should go there,” Radulovich said. But he thinks the same money could be better used other ways, such as for a dedicated Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lane.

Jerry Cauthen, a retired SFMTA transportation engineer who cofounded San Francisco Tomorrow and SaveMuni, explained that he initially liked the concept of a subway but then became “bitterly disappointed” as the project progressed.

The subway line has three stops mapped out: one at Moscone Center, one at Union Square/Market Street, and one in Chinatown. From the Chinatown station, the tunnel will continue under Washington Square and remain there for future extensions to the subway, which is projected to begin service in 2018.

“There’s no reason to wait 10 years for a subway,” Cauthen said. “Because it is not going to do what it says it will do.”

Cauthen explained that the route for the Central Subway misses the most important lines anyway, which would be “serving Chinatown poorly.” Cauthen was not alone in his concern that the three-stop subway system will prove to be more of a hassle than a convenience.

But in a committee meeting held Nov. 16 at City Hall, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (which oversees capital expenditures, while the SFMTA runs Muni) addressed the issue that the city in fact does not have all the money it needs to complete this project. While federal officials have already handed over $72 million out of $948 million, getting the rest of that federal money requires the city and its affected agencies to come up with local matching funds of between $137 million to $225 million.

Malcolm Yeung, public policy manager for the Chinatown Community Development Center, explained that based on the recent hearing, the SFMTA needs to find a viable source for the remaining $137 million. It has until February to inform the Federal Transportation Administration how it will obtain the rest of this money. The SFCTA meeting was an attempt to request an allocation of about $22 million in Proposition K (sales tax) funds.

Now that the city is having trouble meeting its fiscal goal by February 2011, the new question is, if city officials don’t come up with the money, will San Francisco lose the project and its funding?

“I don’t think it means that we lose the whole project,” Yeung said, but there could be delays. And every time there is a delay, there is also an associated cost to be paid.

According to SFMTA, the project received $948.2 million in federal money, $375 million from the state, and $255.1 million in local contributions. Norris explained that since the federal money was given for this specific New Starts program, then it can only be used for this project. And if the project comes to a halt, the money will go somewhere else. “People don’t realize that $948 million is part of the New Starts program,” Norris said. “If we don’t get it, we actually lose it.”

Fong, Chiu, and other supporters of the project rallied in its support outside City Hall on Nov. 15. As Fong told us, “[People against the project] don’t appreciate the hard work, that it takes a decade to get the federal funds … It cannot be simply shifted or “redirected” as some have said.”

For Fong, ending this project would be “disregarding two decades of hard work.” Although the ideas to improve Muni seem fair to Fong, moving forward with the subway is the only option for him right now.

 

*This article has been corrected from an original version.

Investing in the future

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

The nation’s crumbling infrastructure is in very serious need of rebuilding. There’s absolutely no doubt about that.

Miles and miles of roads, highways and airport runways need to be repaired or replaced, as do miles and miles of railroad track. Many bridges and other public structures need to be fixed. So do many streets and many street lights, many water and flood control systems, many park and recreation and port facilities’ high speed train systems need developing and so does very much more that’s vital to our daily lives.

Look around you. You can’t possibly miss examples of crumbling infrastructure.

The AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions have been pointing that out for many years, and noting that the obviously needed repair and replacement work would provide jobs for many thousands, if not millions, of the unemployed, who need work as badly as the infrastructure needs it. Those jobs are good, relatively well-paying jobs – exactly what we need to escape the Great Recession that’s continuing to plague the nation.

It’s pretty much what was done during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt, with the support of Congress, put together the Works Projects Administration, or WPA, to put millions of jobless Americans to work on building and repairing the infrastructure. It worked then, and it would work now.

Last month, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and the Treasury Department issued a report detailing the benefits of doing the needed infrastructure work, including the “long term economic benefits.” The report also noted that a huge majority of Americans support spending tax money on infrastructure improvement.

President Obama’s labor-endorsed plan for infrastructure improvements over the next six years calls rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, laying and maintaining 4,000 miles of  railroad tracks, and creating a new air traffic control system that would reduce delays.

President Edward Wytkind of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department hailed the president’s plan for its promise of “putting millions of Americans to work in the type of good jobs that transportation investments have supported for more than a century.”

Laborers Union President Terry O’Sullivan noted that “time is running out.” He said, “We need to invest in our country, and we need to create jobs as soon as possible. It’s a no-brainer – let’s build our country, create jobs, keep America competitive in the 21st century and leave behind real assets  for future generations.”

Author Ezra Klein, writing in the Washington Post, put it this way:  “infrastructure investment creates the right jobs, for the right people, doing the right things – and at the right time. Or, to say it more clearly, infrastructure investment creates middle-class jobs for workers in a sector with high unemployment and it puts them to work doing something that we actually need done at a moment when doing it is cheaper than it ever will be again.”

He’s right. Boy, is he right.  Yet there’s a considerable body of naysayers in Congress – most of them Republicans, as you might expect – who threaten to block the bills necessary for implementing Obama’s ambitious infrastructure plans.

We need those bills passed in a hurry. We need the millions of jobs they’ll provide. We need to carry out the long delayed modernization of our crumbling infrastructure.

Do San Francisco cyclists need a lift?

Sasha Cuttler
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10
Do San Francisco cyclists need a lift?

The abundance of hills in San Francisco may prove to be a formidable obstacle to the city’s goal of increasing the percentage of commuters who use bicycles, particularly for hilltop residents leery ending their days with steep climbs. But motorized lifts could prove to be a potential solution, one now being pondered by public officials and cycling advocates.

Bike lifts are used in several European cities, including Brussels, Belgium and Trondheim, Norway. It consists of a foot plate on a motorized track that pushes riders up the hill at a speed of about three to seven miles per hour.

At a San Francisco Transportation Authority Plans and Programs Committee meeting last month, Sup. David Chiu mentioned seeing the lifts while on his recent trip through the Netherlands, where he went to get ideas for San Francisco to expand bicycle ridership to a full 20 percent of vehicle trips by 2020, a goal set by the Board of Supervisors shortly after that discussion.

“We’re talking about the hilly terrain that can be dealt with in many different ways, but not without investment,” SFTA Director Jose Luis Moscovich said at the meeting. Using the lifts was an idea raised by Renee Rivera, acting Executive Director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. Moscovich responded to the proposal by saying, “We’d probably need to invest in some of those.”

“It’s an idea we’ve shared often and the response is, ‘Hey, I want one of those for my hill,’” Rivera told us. “It’s certainly something that has resonated with some folks, but we think we’ve got some more basic questions to deal with first and that really is improving our network of bike routes here in San Francisco so that they really carry people where they need to go.”

SFBC has had discussions with the Presidio Trust about installing a lift that would take people from the Fort Point parking lot up to the visitor’s center. “It would be in itself a fun attraction for people going to the Golden Gate Bridge because there’s kind of a climb getting up to the bridge,” Rivera said.

While the idea might sound a little far fetched, the flood gates have opened for bicycle-friendly projects in San Francisco. A four-year court injunction that prohibited city engineers from implementing the San Francisco Bicycle Plan was lifted in August and the Board of Supervisors voted in October to approve a resolution to increase the number of trips taken by bicycle to 20 percent of the transportation share by the year 2020. Currently, about 7 percent of the trips within the city are made by bicycle, a figure that has doubled in recent years.

Trampe is the name of the Norwegian lift and the system’s website notes, “In a user survey, 41 percent of the lift users claim they are using the bicycle more often due to the installation of Trampe,” and 72 percent said they would like to see more lifts in Trondheim.

What do you say, San Franciscans, you want one on your hill as well?

The Performant: Rite of autumn

Andrew Lam
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0

It might have been unannounced, but there’s a ritual aspect to all this the Giants-Halloween-Dia de los Muertos mayhem all the same. And like any great autumnal rite, the cathartic frenzy implies a greater narrative — one last big harvest before the little death of winter, the rebirth of spring. How appropriate to the season then, was the Ragged Wing production “Persephone’s Roots” a site-specific re-imagining of the Persephone myth at Berkeley’s Cordornices Park. 

Persephone — as you might remember — is the daughter of Demeter, and traditionally the story told is that she was kidnapped into the underworld by Hades, which caused Demeter to neglect the Earth while she searched for her, bringing barren winter to the land. Ragged Wing’s Persephone was a far more willful curator of her own destiny. 

As an oddience, we followed her self-propelled journey into the underworld past a three-headed Hecate at the crossroads, around a despairing Sisyphus and Tantalus, through a spiral maze (Hecate’s Temple) where we wrote down our shadow thoughts and cast them into a basket to be burned later on during the climactic reunion scene. Then to the Fates picnic, where Persephone defiantly ate of an onion, and the three weird sisters snipped her thread. 

No victim, this Persephone was a willing Queen of the Underworld, and when Demeter found her at last, beside the bonfires of the “hearth of the triple goddess” (Hecate again) their agreement that Persephone would spend the spring months above ground was hard won. The wooded paths, trickling waterways, and rapidly descending nightfall made the journey feel very otherworldly and the park seem downright mysterious. 

Speaking of mysterious, I will never look at the Shakespeare Garden in Golden Gate Park in quite the same way now that I’ve seen it in the neon of glowsticks at midnight, the end station of the interactive, city-wide Journey to the End of the Night.  

Beginning at Justin Hermann plaza at 8 p.m., the game spread out over much of the city—from Chinatown, to SoMa, to the Mission, to Haight, to Golden Gate Park. The goal was to get through to each checkpoint via public transportation and collect a signature after performing some minor task (most involved was probably the “Change of Face” station in Dore Alley, where we had to exchange parts of our costumes with strangers in the back room of Lennon Studios. 

The challenge was getting to each checkpoint without being caught by a “chaser” since, like zombies, their powers of evil would then corrupt you and you would become one of them. Indeed, by the end of the night, chasers almost outnumbered survivors, and my group of three survivors were congratulated heartily on our triumph at the entrance to the garden. 

The light at the end of the tunnel was a dreamy, participatory performance by nerd arcana swashbucklers Corpus Callosum, who exhorted us to “drink to the ghosts of the night”, a ritual appropriate for any season. 

 

GOLDIES 2010 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: Rick and Megan Prelinger

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: Rick and Megan Prelinger

“Juxtaposition,” “serendipity,” “appropriation,” and “collaboration” are all words that come up frequently when you talk to Rick and Megan Prelinger about the Prelinger Library.

Tucked above a SoMa carpet store, the space (“a free offering, an installation, a workshop, and an extension of our living room,” according to the handout given to visitors) is stuffed floor-to-ceiling with books, maps, magazines, and other ephemera. It is a place where artists, students, teachers, architects, T-shirt makers — basically anyone with a curious, creative mind — can seek information and inspiration. Visitors are encouraged to photograph, copy, and scan materials for future use in their own projects.

“This is a completely unconventional library,” Rick says. “It’s much more a place where serendipity rules.”

A certain magic comes courtesy of the library’s unconventional shelving system, designed by Megan to maximize what she calls “browsing-based discoveries.” It’s based on a continuum of ideas and interests, not Dewey Decimals. In a section dedicated to the American South, for example, a dusty government tome about Georgia’s river system might nestle next to a paperback copy of Deliverance.

“[Library visitors] tend to start going where they think they’re headed,” Megan said. “Then they find something they’d never seen before, and they just go in a different direction. They come out going, “Wow! I thought I was looking for this, but I found this.'<0x2009>”

Opened to the public in June 2004, the Prelinger is tailored to its current location. Though the fit is snug, Prelingers have no plans to upsize. “The collection is composed in such a way that there’s a relationship between the aisles,” Rick explains.

But the collection is anything but static. In addition to what they call the “user-based chaos” that arises when visitors remove and replace books on the shelves, the Prelingers are constantly adding to, and editing, their highly selective inventory. Subjects range from transportation and land-use to media studies and political history (they joke that the stacks harbor “98 percent bad ideas”). “[The library is] specific to what we’re interested in,” Rick says. “But we’re interested in a lot of things.”

The Prelinger also boasts an online component composed of thousands of digital books that may be downloaded for free. Though this represents only a fraction of the physical collection, it’s a useful tool for those who can’t visit the library in person. As it is, the place has limited hours, and both Prelingers support it with other endeavors.

Megan is also a historian, a wild-bird rehabilitator, and an author; her 2010 release, Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-62 (Blast Books), is a gorgeous, hefty volume that culls and contextualizes imagery from magazines like Missiles and Rockets, bound editions of which can be admired in the library. Rick is widely known for the Prelinger Archives, a groundbreaking moving image archive he founded in 1983. It eventually grew to include more than 60,000 works — all originally made by amateurs or earmarked for industrial, educational, and advertising use. Much of it was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 and 2003 (some 2,500 titles are also available online). The archive inspired Rick’s 2004 collage film, Panorama Ephemera, as well as his popular “Lost Landscapes” presentations, which meld lively discussions about history with found footage.

Along those lines, the Prelingers have a new-old passion: home movies. “Megan and I now run a really fast-growing and exciting home movie collection,” Rick says. “Home movies — that’s the only cinema that matters for me. Each one is unique. We think we understand home movies, but they’re shallow and deep at the same time.”

Rick’s latest film (“slowly in the works”) will be based on this burgeoning collection. “One of the things that we say we’re trying to do — it’s a little grandiose, but it’s actually true — is putting together a complete ethnographic portrait of 20th century North America through home movies,” Rick says. Looking at what they’ve accomplished so far, it’s not hard to conclude that if anyone can pull off such a feat, it’ll be the Prelingers.

www.archive.org/details/prelinger; www.prelingerlibrary.org

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

No good answers

Andrew Lam
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1
No good answers

rebeccab@sfbg.com

There was lots of anger from victims and legislators but very few substantive answers from regulators or Pacific Gas & Electric Co. officials during an Oct. 19 hearing at the state capitol on the Sept. 9 gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people, injured at least 50 others, and destroyed 37 homes in San Bruno.

State senators grilled PG&E executives and officials from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), demanding to know why an aging segment of the San Bruno pipeline had been neglected despite having been flagged several years ago as high-risk and in need of repair.

Residents from San Bruno, including some who lost loved ones in the catastrophic incident, recounted their terrifying experiences of that night. Five San Bruno residents filed suit Oct. 19 against PG&E in San Mateo County Superior Court.

The complaints allege that the utility didn’t do enough to maintain the pipeline: “Investigation has revealed that the pipeline that exploded was a ticking time bomb,” one of the complaints states. “The San Bruno pipeline explosion was completely preventable.”

WHAT IS “SAFE”?

A central focus of the California Senate committee hearing was Line 132, the gas line that ruptured. PG&E installed the 30-inch, high-pressure steel pipeline in San Bruno some 50 years ago.

In 2007, the company approached the CPUC as part of an annual rate-setting process and asked for higher rates, justifying its request with a list of repairs that needed funding. A segment of Line 132, several miles from the epicenter of the explosion, was on the list. The CPUC granted a $5 million rate increase to complete the upgrade, but the work was never done. The money presumably went toward a different project deemed a higher priority.

In 2009, PG&E was back at the CPUC again with a second request for additional funding and a new project list in hand. Line 132 was included again, coupled with a document noting, “The risk of a failure at this location [is] unacceptably high.”

But even though the upgrade was never scheduled and the project never completed, Line 132 vanished from the repair list by the time PG&E returned to the CPUC as part of the rate-setting process in 2010. By then, an engineer had determined it would not have to be replaced for several more years.

“Our engineers looked at that piece of pipe and deemed it was safe until 2013, at which time we should continue to look forward to its construction,” Kirk Johnson, vice president of gas operations at PG&E, said during the hearing.

That assertion prompted Assemblymember Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo) to ask Johnson how PG&E defines “safe.” Reading aloud from the project summary included in the second request for funding, Hill noted, “‘The likelihood of failure makes the risk of a failure at this location unacceptably high.’ Are you saying that that description is a ‘safe’ condition?”

In response, Johnson launched into a detailed description of what factors are considered when calculating risk, but Hill cut him off. “Would that be considered a safe pipe?” he repeated.

“I think for a pipeline to be deemed safe, it needs to go through an analysis to ensure that it’s safe, and that line was deemed safe,” Johnson responded.

Essentially, PG&E reached different conclusions about the integrity of the same section of pipeline over the course of several years, and no one at the hearing seemed able to explain why. The utility flagged the pipeline stretch as being in need of replacement in 2007, received millions of dollars in the form of higher utility rates to do it, spent the money on a different repair instead, went back and requested more money citing the same repair, and then decided that the pipe would remain intact until 2013.

For all the inconsistency, that particular segment of Line 132 was not actually the same section that blew apart. CPUC Executive Director Paul Clanon emphasized this point. “The discussion that alarms me the most,” he said, “is the part that blew wasn’t on that list.”

Meanwhile, the San Bruno pipeline wasn’t the only utility infrastructure PG&E never fixed, even though ratepayers forked over the cost of the repair. A list released by The Utility Reform Network (TURN) focused on the electric side of the gas-and-electric company’s vast system, noting that the utility received millions in 2007 for a slew of reliability and safety-related projects, but never quite got around to completing them. Among the neglected projects were transformer replacements, gas meter protection upgrades, reliability and safety equipment, and inspections that can help identify deficiencies.

“Consumers are shocked to realize that when PG&E is authorized to raise rates, it gets the money with no strings attached,” said Mindy Spatt, a spokesperson for TURN. “PG&E is the only entity responsible for those pipelines, and the CPUC is the only entity that regulates PG&E. So between the two of them, the buck’s got to stop somewhere.”

THE WATCHDOG

A federal investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to determine the cause of the blast has yet to reach any definitive conclusions. A preliminary NTSB report noted that just before the explosion, a system malfunction occurred when PG&E was working on a power-supply terminal in Milpitas, triggering a surge in the gas-line pressure.

Until the whole mystery is unraveled, regulators can’t accurately determine how to safeguard against such a tragedy in the future. “I have no idea how this could’ve been prevented,” Richard Clark, director of the consumer protection and safety division of the CPUC, said when asked what the agency could have done differently.

Legislators fired pointed questions about why this issue hadn’t been more closely scrutinized by the CPUC. “Did the PUC do any accounting when you gave them $5 million?” Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter) queried Clark. “Do we just give them money and cross our fingers and hope they fix it? Is that what we do? Until some terrible tragedy occurs?”

Clark’s response was that the CPUC does not manage on the level of individual projects — all the upkeep, maintenance, testing, and replacement of pipeline infrastructure is up to PG&E. The utility maintains its own list of needed repairs, and the company has license to prioritize repairs and funnel money from one project to another without seeking prior approval from the regulatory body. It conducts its own audits, and the regulatory agency looks over the paperwork.

“We can’t run the company for them,” Clark said. “We don’t take a microscopic look, if you will, at what it is they’re doing.”

A team of nine inspectors for the entire state of California is tasked with auditing PG&E’s infrastructure improvements. For the first time in years, the CPUC has submitted a request to hire a few more, Executive Director Paul Clanon noted. This small staff physically inspects about 1 percent of the state’s entire gas pipeline infrastructure. PG&E has about 5,700 miles of natural gas transmission lines, with about 1,000 miles in densely populated regions classified as “high consequence areas.”

Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) suggested that the CPUC should exercise more hands-on oversight. “Might it make sense to look at a different way of working with them?” Leno asked. He noted that the San Bruno explosion wasn’t the first time a PG&E pipeline failure had resulted in a loss of life or significant property damage. “We’ve got a pattern here,” Leno said. “And we’re not doing anything differently. In fact, we’re not even fining them.”

In 2008, a PG&E gas leak in Rancho Cordova led to a pipeline explosion, killing one person and injuring a few others. Leno reminded the CPUC of this tragedy, demanding to know if the agency had fined PG&E after finding the utility was at fault. It hadn’t yet, Clanon responded.

When Leno pressed for an explanation, Clanon said, “We were slow, and we should’ve been quicker.” The utility can be fined up to $20,000 for each violation, Clanon explained — and as things stand, there are no additional penalties for violations resulting in injury or death.

A HARD LOOK

Since the San Bruno pipeline explosion occurred, the CPUC has convened an independent panel of technical experts to assess the disaster, a parallel effort to the NTSB investigation. The committee will issue a set of recommendations on how PG&E should change its design, operation, construction, maintenance, or management practices to improve safety.

“We’ll be examining whether there may be systemic management problems at the utility,” Clark noted. The CPUC panel may also recommend new legislative changes to allow the state to clamp down on PG&E’s activities. “We’re taking a hard look at ourselves, and we’re taking a hard look at PG&E,” Clark said.

One point that’s abundantly clear is that the utility does not lack the money to address its system deficiencies. PG&E revenue was $13.4 billion in 2009, its rates are 30 percent higher than the national average, and its shareholders receive a cool 11.35 percent return on equity.

The utility came under fire this past spring for sinking $40 million into Proposition 16 — a ballot measure that would have effectively eliminated competition for the monopolistic utility by snuffing out municipal power programs. Now that its unaddressed repairs in San Bruno and elsewhere have come to light, the company’s profits and substantial executive bonuses may come under closer scrutiny.

Yet whatever regulatory changes come into play will hardly matter for those San Bruno residents whose lives were permanently altered by the loss of family members. James Ruigomez, a resident who testified at the hearing, told legislators that his son’s girlfriend, Jessica Morales, had just settled down to watch a football game with his son Joe Ruigomez on the night of the explosion. Morales died in the blaze and Joe is still recovering in the hospital.

The tragedy filled James Ruigomez with guilt and sorrow, he said — but also anger. “Extreme anger,” he added, “knowing that this possibly could’ve been prevented.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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0

news@sfbg.com

THURSDAY, OCT. 29

Bert for BART

BART board candidate Bert Hill, who is endorsed by a broad array of progressive organizations in his bid to unseat Republican incumbent James Fang, will be campaigning and meeting commuters along with several of his campaign’s supporters.

4:30–7 p.m., free

Balboa Park BART Station

401 Geneva Ave., SF

www.bert4bart.org

FRIDAY, OCT. 29

Halloween Critical Mass

Find a costume, hop on your bicycle, and join the monthly Critical Mass bike ride, Halloween edition. This rolling street party is always a fun way to flip the normal transportation paradigm, but it’s even more festive when composed of zombies, naughty nurses, and sexy cops.

6 p.m., free

Justin Herman Plaza

Market and Embarcadero

www.sfcriticalmass.org

Zombie Flash Mob

Guardian sources have warned that a mob of zombies, possibly dressed in prom attire, will rampage through the streets of the Mission. They are said to be protesting being marginalized and are showing their solidarity with the LGBTQ community. Eventually, our sources say, they will converge at El Rio, 3158 Mission St., for a zombie prom featuring live music by Elle Niño and others, with a cover charge of $3 for the undead and $7 for the living.

8 p.m., free

Corner of 16th and Mission, SF

elleninosf@gmail.com

SUNDAY, OCT. 31

(SF) Rally to Restore Sanity

If you can’t make it to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for the Rally to Restore Sanity and the March to Keep Fear Alive, the send-up of political events by Comedy Central satirists Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, you can still take part in SF’s local version. The event include guest speakers, comedy, poetry, and dancing.

9 a.m.–3 p.m., free

Civic Center Plaza

Larkin and Grove, SF

www.sfsanityrally.com

MONDAY, NOV. 1

Urban Water Rates

Panelists from the industry will seek to answer whether water pricing at the urban water agency level can work as a water conservation tool, whether rate increases jeopardize revenue, and how to serve low-income and low-use customers. RSVP at info@whollyh2o.org.

1 p.m.–3 p.m., free

Jellyfish Gallery

1286 Folsom, SF

www.whollyh20.org

TUESDAY, NOV. 2

Election Day

This election features pivotal races for the governor of California, U.S. Senate, and San Francisco Board of Supervisors, as well as important local and state propositions, so don’t forget to vote. Use this week’s cover as a cheat sheet or view our complete endorsements. Also visit the Guardian’s Politics blog on Election Day for a rundown on the evening parties and follow our live election coverage there that night.

7 a.m. to 8 p.m., free

SF City Hall basement

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF

www.sfgov.org/elections

 

 

Don’t believe everything the government tells you

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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0

So this is weird. I was poking around on the National Pipeline Safety Mapping System website today, which is administered by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration, looking for information relating to the San Bruno pipeline explosion. When I ran a search for gas pipeline operators in San Francisco, two different names cropped up: The first is a gas technician who works for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., and the second, also listed as a PG&E contact, is local environmental justice advocate Francisco Da Costa. Wait, what?

Da Costa is a well-known figure at city hall who frequently speaks up during public comment at Board of Supervisors meetings. He’s the director of a Bayview organization called Environmental Justice Advocacy, and he blogs about local political issues on his website. When he speaks of PG&E, he tends to use phrases like “diabolical.” Da Costa wears several hats, but PG&E gas pipeline operator certainly isn’t one of them. Not only is he incorrectly identified as such in this federal search engine, complete with his email address and phone number, his name is tagged with the phrase “San Bruno Natural Gas Line” — virtually the only subject a member of the public would be on that website to collect information about.

Da Costa told me this headache started when he submitted an information request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that is conducting an investigation to determine the cause of the San Bruno gas-pipeline rupture. Somehow, in the course of processing his public-records request, it appears that the government wound up incorrectly listing him as a gas operator with PG&E. He’s notified them of the error, but as of this afternoon, it hadn’t been corrected.

Ironically, Da Costa’s request for information on the San Bruno pipeline prompted other info-seekers to contact him. “Ever since I initiated a FOIA request, fire chiefs have emailed me saying to provide them with the maps of the pipelines and so on and so forth,” he said. “I’ve received about 15 or 20 emails from fire chiefs all over California. I had to tell them, I’m not a gas operator.”

When we phoned the National Pipeline Mapping System to ask how Da Costa wound up being a listed as a PG&E pipeline operator, a spokesperson said she would check into it and call us back.

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