Transportation

How Weird is on — probably — for one last year

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By Steven T. Jones
The How Weird Street Faire, which had its permits denied by city officials a couple weeks ago, won a bittersweet victory this morning at an appeals hearing before Department of Parking and Transportation administrator Bond Yee. “It’s clear to me this event is popular, and that’s a good thing, but that’s also a bad thing,” Yee said after hearing from supporters of the event and neighbors who complained that it’s just too big and loud. So he cut the baby in two by agreeing that it was too late to find a new venue for the May 6 event and awarding its permits for this year, but attaching several restrictive conditions (most notably, cutting the music off at 6 pm rather than 8) and ruling that this is the last year the event can be held in the Howard Street neighborhood. “It’s my opinion that the event is too big for this venue,” Yee said. Yet even if event promoters can meet Yee’s conditions, they must still meet pending requirements from the San Francisco Police Department, whose commander for the region, Capt. Dennis O’Leary, spoke against the event at the hearing. “I support the community in this matter and I hear their voices. They don’t want it to happen,” he said. Yet event organizers submitted a petition signed by 100 people from the neighborhood that support the event, whereas those complaining about the event number less than 10, although many are quite upset about having up to 10,000 descend on their neighborhood for the day. Last year’s event almost got canceled after police tried to double their security fees from the previous year, although higher-ups intervened and they were brought back down to reasonable levels. Asked by the Guardian about his apparent bias against this event, O’Leary said he wouldn’t be unduly harsh with How Weird promoters: “That’s not my reputation. I’m very fair.” Yet he also said, “I haven’t made up my mind as to staffing levels.”
Stay tuned.

How Weird is on — probably — for one last year

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By Steven T. Jones
The How Weird Street Faire, which had its permits denied by city officials a couple weeks ago, won a bittersweet victory this morning at an appeals hearing before Department of Parking and Transportation administrator Bond Yee. “It’s clear to me this event is popular, and that’s a good thing, but that’s also a bad thing,” Yee said after hearing from supporters of the event and neighbors who complained that it’s just too big and loud. So he cut the baby in two by agreeing that it was too late to find a new venue for the May 6 event and awarding its permits for this year, but attaching several restrictive conditions (most notably, cutting the music off at 6 pm rather than 8) and ruling that this is the last year the event can be held in the neighborhood. “It’s my opinion that the event is too big for this venue,” Yee said. Yet even if event promoters can meet Yee’s conditions, they must still meet pending requirements from the San Francisco Police Department, whose commander for the region, Capt. Dennis O’Leary, spoke against the event at the hearing. “I support the community in this matter and I hear their voices. They don’t want it to happen,” he said. Yet event organizers submitted a petition signed by 100 people from the Howard Street neighborhood that support the event, whereas those complaining about the event number less than 10, although many are quite upset about having up to 10,000 descend on their neighborhood for the day. Last year’s event almost got canceled after police tried to double their security fees from the previous year, although higher-ups intervened and they were brought back down to reasonable levels. Asked by the Guardian about his apparent bias against this event, O’Leary said he wouldn’t be unduly harsh with How Weird promoters: “That’s not my reputation. I’m very fair.” Yet he also said, “I haven’t made up my mind as to staffing levels.”
Stay tuned.

Car-free support

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› steve@sfbg.com

Sup. Jake McGoldrick plans to reintroduce his Healthy Saturdays legislation this week and told the Guardian he’s confident that a new city study paves the way for its implementation by this summer.

Healthy Saturdays — which would create a six-month trial Saturday closure to cars on the same streets in the eastern portion of Golden Gate Park that are now closed Sundays — was approved by the Board of Supervisors last May but vetoed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who ordered a study of the impacts of the Sunday closure.

That study by the Transportation Authority and Department of Parking and Traffic brought great news for Healthy Saturday supporters, concluding that road closure is extremely popular with park users and has no significant negative impact to attendance at the park’s museums, access by those with disabilities, availability of adequate parking, or traffic congestion at the intersections around the park.

"It spells out a very positive picture," McGoldrick told us. "Anecdotally, we knew all this, but now we have the empirical data laid out."

The study found that closing the roads encourages 40 percent more nonvehicular trips to the park. Almost 40 percent of those surveyed said the road closure makes them more likely to visit the park, while 10 percent said it made them less likely, and the rest said it had no impact.

"I see no good reason why this shouldn’t fly through the board and Mayor’s Office," Leah Shabum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told us. "The report shows without a doubt there are no negative impacts to creating car-free spaces in the park."

Yet the proposal last year drew strong visceral reactions from opponents in adjacent neighborhoods, some representatives for those with disabilities, and those affiliated with the de Young Museum and other cultural institutions in the park — some of whom say they still aren’t satisfied with the report’s conclusions.

A group called Park Access for All sent out a press release urging the city to reject closure. Member Ron Miguel of the Planning Association for the Richmond said the city shouldn’t do anything until the Academy of Sciences reopens late next year. And disabilities advocate Tim Hornbecker said he was concerned that the city still hasn’t put in place a tram and other improvements that were approved along with Healthy Saturdays last year.

Those improvements have stalled at the Recreation and Park Department, which answers to the Mayor’s Office. The Guardian asked Newsom about the report Feb. 15, and he said, "I haven’t seen that," and ignored further questions. Newsom spokesperson Peter Ragone told us, "We’re in the process of digesting it and deciding how to move forward."

But Healthy Saturdays advocates point to statements Newsom made after the veto, noting that the study seems to satisfy all the concerns he expressed. Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, told us, "It should be a no-brainer. All the original objections cited by the mayor are addressed…. At this point, holding it up would be obstreperous." *

The Healthy Saturdays report is available at www.goldengatepark.org.

As the port turns

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› news@sfbg.com

Another setback to the Port of San Francisco’s plan to allow development of Piers 27–31 has brought about a new round of soul-searching at the beleaguered agency, as well as calls to change what may be allowed along the waterfront.

Last month the port’s latest private development partner, Shorenstein Properties, withdrew its plan for a mixed-use facility that relied on large amounts of office space to recoup the cost of renovating the dilapidated piers. The State Lands Commission, which watchdogs new waterfront construction for adequate maritime and public recreation uses, signaled in November 2006 that it would not support the office-heavy design. The port’s previous development partner, Mills Corp., pulled out last March after half a decade of public Sturm und Drang over its plan for a shoreside mall.

For years the Port Commission has looked to Piers 27–31 as a magic bullet for its financial woes. The port receives relatively little money from actual port operations, and as an enterprise fund department, it receives no subsidies from the city’s General Fund. Moreover, when the state transferred jurisdiction to the agency by way of the 1968 Burton Act, it handed down a good deal of debt and deferred maintenance.

Estimates now put the cost of fixing the port’s crumbling piers and properties at around $1.4 billion, with the vast majority of those costs not yet funded. With construction costs rising between 8 and 10 percent every year, port and city officials are starting to realize that even if Shorenstein’s plan eventually makes it through the gauntlet of government agencies and public oversight, the one-time infusion of cash it would provide would not be enough.

"It is a pretty dire situation," the port’s executive director, Monique Moyer, said at a Feb. 13 commission meeting. "And we do need all hands on deck" to try to solve the problem.

Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, whose district includes Piers 27–31, has answered Moyer’s call. In the last several weeks, he has floated two new ideas that could have a wide-ranging impact on the 7 1/2 miles of shoreline under port control. As reported in the San Francisco Business Times, Peskin told a Hotel Council luncheon on Jan. 17 that he and Moyer have been discussing hotel development on the city’s piers, something Proposition H, passed by voters in 1990, currently prohibits.

Peskin told the Guardian his hotel concept is in the very early stages and stems from the fact that the State Lands Commission considers hotels to be allowable uses of waterfront property. He stressed that the proposal, which would require a new ballot initiative, is "not by any means a wholesale abandonment of Prop. H." It would instead seek to designate certain piers for hotels after consulting with neighborhood groups and other stakeholders.

"The question is are we willing to have a couple [or] three of them in the right places? That’s it," Peskin said, voicing his opinion that the "right places" would probably fit somewhere between South Beach and Pier 27. "Fisherman’s Wharf does not need any new hotels."

Peskin’s second idea involves replacing much of Shorenstein’s proposed office space at Pier 27 with a year-round cruise ship terminal. For years the port had a public-private partnership similar to the one with Shorenstein to build a new terminal at Piers 30 and 32. But its development partner, the Australian firm Lend Lease Corp., backed out of the deal last year. Shorenstein officials did not answer numerous requests for comment, but Peskin told us the company has expressed some interest to him in going forward with a cruise terminal design.

Not surprisingly, hotel industry representatives enthusiastically backed Peskin’s plan to revisit Prop. H. Hotel consultant Rick Swig highlighted the benefits of letting hotel developers rehab the waterfront. Any new hotels would be "built with somebody else’s money," he reasoned, "and generate tax fund money which goes to the General Fund of the city of San Francisco."

Others weren’t so excited. John Rizzo of the Bay Area chapter of the Sierra Club lamented the port’s reliance on private development as a means of solving its problems.

"There’s this massive infrastructure [problem], and the city [is telling] the port that you have to go out and find money with the resources you have, and what can they do? The resource they have is the waterfront, and the only thing they can do is develop it," he told us.

Rizzo called for the port to "be freed from [the] financial restrictions" of its enterprise agency status in order to preserve valuable open space from development. "We’re forcing [the port] to take this waterfront and put big buildings on it, and that’s not really what we want."

Jon Golinger of Citizens to Save the Waterfront, one of the groups that actively opposed the Mills Corp. mall, also cited problems with the port’s reliance on development. The infrastructure crisis, he told us, is "a bigger problem, and we can’t develop our way out of it alone. Certainly one project at a time is not working for the port or the community."

Neither Rizzo nor Golinger will comment on Peskin’s ideas until their groups have studied them. But Golinger did say, "Any big ideas like hotels need to be part of a much bigger solution." For example, he cited the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, which receives funding from a dedicated half-cent city sales tax. He added that other port agencies are partially subsidized by public money, such as the Port of Portland in Oregon.

Port officials seem to be coming to grips with the magnitude of their predicament and the failure of their reliance on private development. The conclusion to the latest update on the port’s 10-Year Capital Plan puts it bluntly: "The Port’s private/public partnership development model is broken."

At the Feb. 13 commission meeting, port staff proposed several new methods for finding cash, including tapping into future city Recreation and Park Department general obligation bonds. Moyer told the commissioners that such an arrangement would be a "paradigm shift" in the way the port funds projects, not only because it would use the city’s bond money, but also because the agency does not want to reimburse the General Fund, as it has been obligated to do since its inception.

One thing all parties agree on is something must be done. As Peskin told us, "The fact of the matter is, if we do nothing, we’re going to lose a lot of these resources." *

More than clean

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Cleaner streets, crack-free sidewalks, an urban landscape unmarred by graffiti and made greener by leafy trees: that was the improved "quality of life" espoused by Mayor Gavin Newsom in his State of the City speech Oct. 26, 2006. And he’s put resources into delivering that pretty picture, with increases to the Department of Public Works (DPW) budget and funds allocated for sidewalk revitalization and the citywide Clean Corridors campaign.

But the city’s top-down approach to realizing the mayor’s goals — and the apparent lack of consideration for the implications of those priorities among ordinary people — has created a backlash from affluent District 7 (where Sup. Sean Elsbernd is upset over the fines being doled out to property owners for cracked sidewalks) to the working-class Mission District (where an aggressive new street cleaning regime has been proposed).

"This is something that just dropped out of the blue, and I think it’s unacceptable," Mission resident Peter Turner said at a Jan. 31 public hearing on the proposal to clean many streets in his neighborhood every weekday. "The city has shown a vast amount of disrespect to the Mission."

Others think there are more pressing problems.

"What is quality of life?" asked Vicki Rega, who lives at 21st and Bryant streets and spoke to the Guardian on her way out of the hearing. "Some trash on your street or a dead kid on your sidewalk?"

The signs started appearing a few weeks ago, posted on trees and lamp poles in the Mission. The type is a tiny 10-point font, often difficult to read through the plastic wrap that holds the paper to the pole. Even if you can make out the words, it’s still pretty unclear that they announce a proposal to ramp up mechanical street cleaning — from as little as one day a week to as many as five.

"The signs were very, very confusing," said Eric Noble, a Shotwell Street resident who was further insulted that postings weren’t made in Spanish and Chinese. "That’s really unconscionable in the Mission."

Beyond warning residents of the radical change to their daily lives, the signs invited them to two public hearings to discuss the issue, on Jan. 31 and Feb. 5. The first hearing drew about 150 residents and frustration that the only sign of officialdom present was DPW representative Chris McDaniels, who was sitting alone behind a vast empty desk, taking notes.

"Who is deciding this issue, and why aren’t they here to hear us?" Judith Berkowitz asked.

Attendees expressed anger at the process and annoyance that car-owning residents on dozens of city blocks east of Valencia Street and north of Cesar Chavez Street will face steep fines and be forced to scramble for new parking spots on a daily basis.

At the beginning of the meeting, the reasons for the change were introduced: illegal dumping in the area had doubled in one year, calls to the city’s trash hotline 28-CLEAN had increased 18 percent from 2005 to 2006, and the sweeper truck in the Mission had been collecting huge amounts of trash.

"It’s the sidewalks, not the streets," several speakers said. They pointed out that the trucks are more successful blowing trash around than sucking it up. Many offered numerous suggestions for how to better clean the streets: have more trash cans and volunteers, employ the homeless, coordinate with other city services, educate the merchants, bring back people with brooms and dustpans — but don’t just run trucks through the streets.

One Alabama Street resident said she’s committed to using public transportation to get to her job in Richmond, but like many others at the meeting, she pointed out that if cars need to be moved five days a week for street cleaning, why not move them all the way to work?

"It’s a disincentive for people to use public transit," she said.

And if they don’t get moved, does the city really mind?

"Is it really trash, or is it revenue?" Shotwell Street resident Eric Noble asked, citing the added opportunities for writing parking tickets. "If revenue enhancement is behind this project, you’re going to see it all over the city."

DPW spokesperson Christine Falvey denied money was the motive and said parking fine revenue goes to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which has recently revealed an $11 million budget shortfall. Falvey also said changes in street cleaning schedules are usually prompted by complaints from residents, but in this case the proposal was sparked by recommendations from city staff who work in the area.

Street cleaning trucks have been in use since 1976 and currently clean about 90 percent of city streets, but according to Falvey, the DPW has never done an analysis of their efficiency and effectiveness. A consultant was recently hired to make that determination.

"Every time some city agency comes up with an improvement, it does more to inconvenience," David Jayne, a Potrero Avenue resident, told us. "I’m really worried this is another one-size-fits-all cure."

But Newsom has made clean streets a top priority for his reelection year.

"How do we dare to dream big — while not forgetting to fill potholes, clean our streets and parks, and address the small problems of urban life that make such a big difference to our quality of life?" Newsom asked in his State of the City speech.

And how do we do it without pissing off the neighbors?

"You’re not going to find anyone who says, ‘Yeah, I think the neighborhood should be dirtier,’ " Florida Street resident Scott Adams told us. "Things should be done to improve the hygiene of the streets."

But he and others who live on these streets and have watched them for years said they were prepared to push brooms and pick up trash if the city were willing to work on other qualities of life such as rising violence, slipping public schools, and the truly ill transportation system.

The DPW’s stated mission is "improving the quality of life in San Francisco." And that’s been a popular pastime of recent mayors. Frank Jordan had One Neat City Week and the Litter Strike Force. Willie Brown promoted his Spring Cleanings and Great Sweeps. Gavin Newsom touts a goal to make this the "cleanest and greenest city in the country."

So his proposed 2006–7 budget for the DPW’s Street Environmental Services hovers around $33 million, an 11 percent boost over last year. That’s more than the 7 percent increase the patrol unit of the San Francisco Police Department received, the 4 percent Muni Services and Operations received, the 1 percent that went to Child Support Services, and almost two times more than the rise for the housing and homeless budget line in the Human Services Agency.

Street Environmental Services is a fancy-pants term for picking up trash, spraying off pee, and painting over graffiti. The mayor’s most recent plan to achieve this is called Clean Corridors and was unveiled in November 2006 with a $1.67 million allocation from Newsom for targeting the filthy faces of 100 specific blocks throughout the city. (Although this project focuses on the same areas in the Mission, the increased street cleaning is a separate proposal.)

The essence of Clean Corridors is to get residents and business owners to feel more responsible for their property, using both education and fines for things such as cracked sidewalks and dirty facades.

The program also pays for 20 neighborhood ambassadors who each patrol designated areas, picking up trash, reporting graffiti and areas needing repair, issuing litter citations, and educating the public. They’re essentially litter cops.

"He wanted specific people responsible for areas," Falvey said of the mayor’s ambassador program. "He wants that person to own their block."

Yet some residents bristle at Newsom placing such a high priority on litter as the murder rate is spiking, Muni is failing, housing is becoming less affordable, and city hall is mired in dysfunction.

"The war in Iraq. The violence in the streets — that’s probably my number one concern. Public schools. Transportation," Noble said when we asked about his quality-of-life concerns.

"Quality of life means being able to meet the basic necessities of your life," Myrna Lim said. The Excelsior resident is so frustrated with the parking situation in her neighborhood she organized a protest Feb. 24 against any new fine increases. "If you’re on a very tight budget, $40 for a ticket is a lot. When people talk about San Francisco being a very expensive city, that’s part of it. It makes day-to-day living very difficult. Over what? Parking?"

Yet the Mission parking proposal has prompted some community organizing. E-mail sign-up lists were passed around the hearing room, and a healthy chat about the issue now exists at a Yahoo! group. Several residents who aren’t currently members of neighborhood organizations told us they’re thinking about joining or starting one.

"I was quite amazed to see all the people," Noble said of the first hearing and the conversation it sparked. "Maybe one thing that will come out of this is more neighborhood discussions."

The DPW has also been chastened and scheduled an evening meeting in March. "We’ve heard overwhelming support that something needs to be done but overwhelming response that it’s not mechanical street cleaning," Falvey said.

"The city should really be a conduit for people to organize themselves," she added. "For any kind of long-term, sustained effort, it’s got to come from the neighbors." *

Death of fun

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By Steven T. Jones
We warned last summer that fun in San Francisco was being threatened by NIMBYs and overzealous bureaucrats. Well, now we’ve just seen the sourpusses strike down one of the best street fairs in San Francisco: the How Weird Street Faire, an open air dance party that drew about 8,000 attendees last year.
Based on complaints from 10 residents (who appear to have been whipped up by one particularly vocal opponent of the fair), the city’s Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation yesterday denied How Weird organizers their permits, effectively killing an event planned for May 6. Read next week’s Guardian for the details, as well as ways to make public your concerns about maintaining our vibrant urban culture.

Death of fun

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By Steven T. Jones
We warned last summer that fun in San Francisco was being threatened by NIMBYs and overzealous bureaucrats. Well, now we’ve just seen the sourpusses strike down one of the best street fairs in San Francisco: the How Weird Street Faire, an open air dance party that drew about 8,000 attendees last year.
Based on complaints from 10 residents (who appear to have been whipped up by one particularly vocal opponent of the fair), the city’s Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation yesterday denied How Weird organizers their permits, effectively killing an event planned for May 6. Read next week’s Guardian for the details, as well as ways to make public your concerns about maintaining our vibrant urban culture.

Careers and Ed: Bio the people, fuel the people

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› culture@sfbg.com

Cars suck. I have stickers that say so and a venerable beater of a bicycle that underscores the point. But for every one of the approximately 40,000 bicycle commuters in San Francisco, there are more than 10 registered car owners, and just wishing they didn’t exist won’t make it so. But I’m no hater. I’m sure glad my plumber drives a van, for instance, and my gardener roommate wouldn’t get very far without a pickup truck to haul all that gravel and mulch. Still, the environmental, economic, and just plain moral implications of using anything that relies on petroleum for fuel have become increasingly difficult to justify — especially since interest in and access to alternative fuels are on the uptick. Last year’s mayoral biodiesel directive, when implemented, will make San Francisco the national leader in biodiesel use for municipal vehicles. In fact, the demand for biodiesel in the Bay Area could soon outstrip the current supply, and as far as getting in on the ground floor goes, the time has never been better to be involved with biofuels.

Of course, a lot of people get into biodiesel not as a career move but as a form of activist self-sufficiency that hearkens back to the ’70s return-to-the-land movement. The notion that one can power a vehicle on homemade fuel made from recycled cooking oil and a few bucks worth of drain cleaner is nigh-irresistible to penny-pinchers and political progressives alike, and the accessibility of the technology is such that even the least mechanically minded can pick it up with minimum instruction. Some instruction could be beneficial, though. Considering that two of the three major ingredients of biodiesel are highly toxic and flammable (methanol and lye), it may well behoove nascent home brewers to hone their skills in a structured environment, which local biofuel advocates are conveniently providing.

BIODIESEL 101


Jennifer Radtke knows her biofuels. Despite an incongruous educational background in Slavic languages and poli-sci, she has become one of the Bay Area’s premiere authorities on brewing biodiesel and running a biodiesel station, and she has offered courses and internships in both since 2003. As one of the cofounders of the women-owned Berkeley cooperative BioFuel Oasis (which serves as a station for more than 1,600 regular customers) and an instructor for the Real Goods Solar Living Institute and the Berkeley Biodiesel Collective, Radtke is committed to the biodiesel community. She teaches five different classes covering almost every aspect of the biofuel biz for beginners and advanced users alike. Though many of her classes are held in Berkeley, you can occasionally find her holding forth in Golden Gate Park’s SF County Fair Building.

For tyros to the technology, Radtke teaches a one-day introductory class covering biodiesel usage, sustainability, and home brewing. At a typical class, she opens with a presentation on biodiesel basics, listing the benefits and drawbacks of using biodiesel. Even to a nondriver like myself, the benefits appear to outweigh the disadvantages by a hefty margin.

Lower emissions and a higher rate of biodegradability are things I take for granted when thinking about biodiesel, but I certainly didn’t realize it’s less toxic to the human body than table salt when ingested and less irritating to the skin than a 4 percent soap-and-water solution. Biodiesel’s flashpoint (the temperature at which it ignites when exposed to flames) is over 300 degrees Fahrenheit — the flashpoint of petroleum-based diesel is about 125 degrees. Most interesting to me and my low-to-no-maintenance requirements is finding out biodiesel is a natural solvent that cleans out the fuel tank and filters. (Can I get it to do my dishes too?) With bennies like these, who can fault biodiesel for its unfortunate tendency to burst through rubber fuel lines (discontinued since 1994) or eat through your slick new paint job? Such inconveniences seem minor in comparison to those created by toxic, flammable petroleum-based fuels.

After a comparison discussion of biodiesel to petroleum diesel and SVO (straight veggie oil), Radtke demonstrates home brewing and discusses the chemistry involved. After a lunch break, the students brew their own one-to-two-liter batch. Starting out with a quantity of recycled cooking oil, the class tests for water and free fatty acids, a process known as titration. (When water is present in the oil, the home brewer runs the risk of making soap instead of fuel.) Titration determines whether the used oil is too rancid or has been broken down too much by high fryer heat. If the oil is deemed usable, students concoct a test brew, mixing the heated oil with methanol (wood alcohol) and sodium hydroxide (lye). Here especially is where the presence of an instructor comes in handy.

Unlike the finished product, the chemical components of biodiesel have a very low flashpoint, and their toxicity is much higher. Methanol in particular can be harmful, even deadly, if improperly handled, and for this reason alone, many biodiesel advocates are still skittish about taking the last step toward home production. After walking beginners through a safe mixing procedure, Radtke discusses washing and filtering the biofuel and assessing its quality. She also discusses how to dispose of byproducts and offers additional educational resources. For people who want to practice brewing bigger batches (20 to 40 gallons) and a get a more in-depth overview of the small production industry, a three-day advanced course is occasionally offered, often on an on-demand basis.

ORGANIC MECHANICS


It doesn’t take long for the would-be home brewer to want to start tinkering with processors. For the mechanically unsavvy, Radtke offers an equipment-building workshop for five participants at a time (often in conjunction with co-instructor Alan Pryor of the Berkeley and Alameda Biodiesel co-ops or alternatively through Real Goods). Hoarding industry secrets doesn’t seem to be an issue for biofuel distributors teaching people how to make their product. In fact, a common denominator among backyard biodiesel advocates seems to be their genuine desire to spread the knowledge of their chosen vocation far and wide. Plus, as Radtke points out, most of her processor-builder students actually come from outside the Bay Area, some from as far away as Southern California, where stations like BioFuel Oasis and the SF Biofuel Cooperative have yet to materialize.

This is a paradox that Radtke and Melissa Hardy, also of BioFuel Oasis, hope to address in their upcoming five-day intensive class, How to Start Your Own Biodiesel Station (Feb. 18–23), walking students through the process, from procuring fuel and testing it to applying for the required permits and necessary funding. Other topics of interest to the budding entrepreneur include zoning and taxation laws, equipment building and maintenance, and even market development. By the end of the course, participants should have a clear vision and a working business plan to get them started in the distribution biz.

In addition to that course, BioFuel Oasis holds monthly fuel filter–changing workshops on-site (next scheduled for Jan. 21). Since biofuel has such a solvent effect, cars that have just recently switched over from regular diesel run the risk of clogging from the leftover residue dredged out by the introduced biofuel. For a $10 to $20 sliding scale fee and about 30 minutes of time, attendees learn to replace their filters, a much preferable option to waiting until they clog on the freeway. Registration and information for any of these classes can be found on the following Web sites: www.backyardbiodiesel.org, www.biofueloasis.com, and (for classes connected with the Solar Living Institute) www.solarliving.org.

MASTERS OF THE BREW


Of course, even the acknowledged masters of their craft were once beginners too. For Jennifer Radtke and dozens of other home brew aficionados in the Bay Area and around the country, the force behind their fascination is one Maria "girl Mark" Alovert. With a background in grassroots activism, girl Mark is one of the nation’s most vocal proponents of home-brewed biofuels and the inventor of the ubiquitous appleseed processor, which can be made cheaply from an old hot-water heater and a handful of hardware store components. Her self-published Biodiesel Homebrew Guide is considered the definitive guide to home brewing, and her two- to four-day seminars for beginners and advanced students alike fill up months in advance. In addition to teaching and touring, girl Mark is a member and sometime moderator of several biodiesel forums and the instigator of a peer-reviewed home-brewing and equipment-building Web site known as the Collaborative Biodiesel Tutorial (www.biodieselcommunity.org). A schedule of her classes and tour dates can be found online at www.girlmark.com and www.localb100.com.

For San Franciscans who’d like their introduction to biofuel to be a little closer to home, the San Francisco Biofuels Cooperative (www.sfbiofuels.org) offers once-a-month orientation meetings where interested parties can get practical advice on everything from where to buy a diesel car to how to advance the biofuel community’s agenda. More than 200 members strong, the co-op’s pumping station shares a location with Incredible Adventures (www.incadventures.com), a local adventure tour company that runs its biofueled fleet all the way to Baja. Co-op members can pay the premium price for biodiesel at the pump (currently $3.65 per gallon) or volunteer a couple hours per month to purchase their biofuel for less. Hailing from the old People’s Food System, former Rainbow Grocery cofounder and SF Biofuels Cooperative Board of Directors member Bill Crolius is also a driving force (with Ben Jordan and Trevitt Schultz) behind the People’s Fuel Cooperative (www.peoplesfuel.org), a biodiesel delivery operation. Taking the long view on energy sustainability, Crolius envisions a future in which even biodiesel will be obsolete, but for the interim, he and his co-op compatriots believe it serves an essential role in weaning people off fossil fuels.

David Dias, advanced transportation and technology project coordinator at City College, organizes workshops on a variety of alternative fueling technologies, including biodiesel, natural gas, and SVO. He also heads the Biodiesel Conversion Club, an extracurricular group dedicated to converting muscle cars such as El Caminos into biodiesel road warriors. Most of the workshops cost money but are open to the general public. Contact Dias for details at (415) 550-4455 or ddias@ccsf.edu.

For nondrivers this is something of a nonissue, but for people who aren’t quite ready to give up the family car or rely on their vehicle the way contractors do, the siren song of home brewing is a seductive one. It doesn’t take much space either: a corner of your garage or the back of a toolshed will do. In light of our national crude addiction and the wars being waged on its behalf, biodiesel is a compelling product; and while there is a San Francisco–based large-scale biodiesel production company in the works (www.sfbiodiesel.com), the reality is that low-cost biodiesel on demand is still a few years away — a reality that makes home brewing an attractive solution and, in time, perhaps even the ultimate answer. *

This is not progress

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TECHSPLOITATION I can’t stop thinking about the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2,000-year-old computerlike device made by some Greeks who wanted to predict the motion of the sun, moon, and stars. Fashioned out of highly-sophisticated interlocking gears, the mechanism was discovered a little over a century ago in a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera. About the size of a shoebox and operated with a hand crank, the machine can also plot the dates of eclipses.
I know all these details because a group of international researchers used cool new X-ray imaging technologies to look at the mechanism, which to the naked eye appears rather like a pile of crusty, corroded plates that have stuck together. Using X-rays, however, scientists could see how the gears fit together. Pictures are available on Nature.com and reveal a machine whose complexity rivals the internals on a Rolex. Researchers say it was probably state-of-the-art technology around 30 BC. It’s likely that Greek astronomers on Rhodes had been perfecting such gear-driven temporal charts of the heavens for decades or even centuries before inventing the Antikythera Mechanism.
As Nature editor Jo Marchant points out, what’s intriguing is not so much that the device existed 2,000 years ago but that the technology behind it ceased to exist for the next 1,000 years until the first mechanical astrolabes and clocks worked their way out of the Arab world and into the West. It’s very possible that gear-driven mechanisms were made throughout the first millennium in the Middle East, but Western scholars have yet to gain access to the ancient texts that describe them.
For people interested in the evolution of technology and so-called scientific progress, the Antikythera Mechanism doesn’t just provoke questions about history. Instead, it asks us to rethink the future. If the ancient Greeks and Romans managed to invent the precursor to information technology 2,000 years ago and then essentially forget about it, what does that say about the kinds of amazing advances we might be throwing away right now?
Tech historians have two theories about why the Greeks and Romans didn’t get into gear mechanisms full bore and invent some kind of clock or computer before the Holy Roman Empire smooshed Europe. First of all, there was no power source for their gear devices other than the hand crank. Weight-powered clocks weren’t invented until the late Middle Ages in Europe. So devices like the Antikythera Mechanism weren’t particularly practical unless you were an astronomer or a rich collector. Plus, who needed to know time down to the minute? As long as you knew the hours and seasons, you could get by just fine in classical antiquity.
More interesting to me is the theory that the widespread practice of slavery in Greece and Rome would have prevented people from trying to create machines that could perform human labor. It’s not that having slaves kept people from inventing gear mechanisms — it just kept them from imagining possible outcomes and applications. If you already have people performing all the manual and intellectual labor you don’t want to do, there’s no need to figure out what kinds of machines would be capable of doing it.
Obviously, it’s impossible to know what stopped our ancestors from connecting the dots and ushering in the information age 2,000 years ago. And it may be equally impossible to figure out what our sociological blind spots are today that prevent us from hurtling into a better world more quickly. Still, there are some missteps in progress we can see and correct before plunging into another Dark Ages. It’s clear that our dependence on oil has halted progress toward finding cleaner, more efficient energy sources. Similarly, the widespread use of cars has halted progress in public transportation.
Who knows what kinds of great discoveries are cast aside when labs lose their funding or graduate students lose hope and slink away from experiments in defeat? Tomorrow’s Antikythera Mechanism is probably sitting in some disgruntled engineer’s garage right now, rusting. Let’s hope we discover it in two years rather than 2,000.<\!s>SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who was actually invented 2,000 years ago but only discovered recently.

Fits and housing starts

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
REVIEW There’s a new multistory condo complex rising on a sliver of SoMa between the freeway and the Caltrain tracks. It’s on one of those heretofore undesirable plots that stood vacant for decades, holding their own as a weedy buffer zone between transportation and industry. I wonder if the contractors are using a new high-tech glass that, in the space of a faux bay window, will neutralize the din of traffic. Who’d want to live there?
San Francisco is an urban area, don’t you know. But the way space here is quickly filling in with homes is reflective of a broader condition of (until recently) a healthy real estate market and the resulting sprawl. It’s something I experience when visiting family in unapologetically suburban Southern California. Just outside my old neighborhood, with streets named to invoke the American Revolution — Freedom Drive, Liberty Bell Road — were oak-shaded dry creek beds where I headed for adolescent escapes. Those once-wooded areas have been shaped into fields of roomy new houses in an unspecific Mediterranean stucco style. The arteries there are named after trees — Spruce Drive, Cedar Lane — that I don’t recall being indigenous. Is it progress or loss?
California denizens cannot avoid the quandaries of safe, “affordable” homes and the problematic environmental effects of building auto-centric communities far from any sort of civic center. The state then makes a fitting geographical framing device for a small but notable exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art. “Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl” brings together a couple dozen artists who picture a half century of development in photographs, painting, video, and sculpture, revealing the allure and shortcomings of suburbia.
While compact and high density rather than sprawling and homogenous, “Suburban Escape” manages to address numerous social and cultural concerns, the first of which is the literal, almost sculptural creation of suburbs. At the start curator Ann Wolfe shows us distant views of cookie-cutter homes. The first piece is William Garnett’s grid of six black-and-white aerial photographs documenting the 1950 construction of the Lakewood, a Southern California community that from above looks like fields of housing starts that sprouted into a grid of cubelike buildings. They’re a perfect complement to Robert Isaacs’s 1968 photograph Ticky Tacky Houses in Daly City, an equally geometric composition that inspires waves of comfort and revulsion. The uniformity looks appealingly orderly from a distance, but the idea of living in houses so similar and close together is another concern altogether, something fraught with unsustainable foundations, not to mention nosy neighbors.
RUDE VIBRATIONS
Suburbia is rife with ambivalent vibes, and they are noted throughout the show. Bill Owens’s photo of a Fourth of July block party expresses a cul-de-sac comfort zone and clean, new neighborliness. And yet, the picture also conveys the psychic isolation of spacious lots. Just one photo from Owens’s 1970s-era Suburbia series isn’t enough to convey his vision, although this picture speaks volumes.
Mimicking the physical structure of housing tracts, a number of the artists work in series. Freshly Painted Houses, a grid of small 1991 color photos by Jeff Brouws, shows the Daly City neighborhood where the artist grew up during the 1960s. The cheerful exterior schemes reflect the influx of Asian American immigrants who, the artist states in the exhibition catalog (which includes an expanded, more convincing range of works than the museum presentation), painted their houses in more vibrant colors than did most of “middle class mainstream America.” The piece adds a welcome layer of social context to architecturally insignificant structures.
DECONSTRUCTION ZONES
John Divola’s provocative series Los Angeles International Airport Noise Abatement Zone, House Removal Grid, Present (1975, 2005) is one of those frighteningly irresistible before-and-after projects. It shows a collection of doomed dwellings that were in the sonic path of LAX and the empty lots after the buildings were razed. Shot in a relatively short time span in the 1970s and printed only recently, the pairings suggest the aftermath of a smart bomb that vaporizes only stucco-faced structures. All that remains are a flat landscape, stoic palm and cypress trees, and the occasional pathway to a nonexistent front door. Next to these, Free House (2003), an acrylic work by Deborah Oropallo, addresses the surprising disposability of suburban buildings with images of boarded-up toy houses — literal model homes — inspired by Berkeley structures that were worth less than the land they were erected on.
That same cheap, serial construction of houses is noted in Mark Campbell’s sculpture Maximum Density (2000), a low platform covered with hundreds of tiny honey-hued rubber homes. At once seemingly organically formed and a highly constructed board game, Campbell’s project is difficult not to touch yet equally difficult to reconcile. Similarly, Destroyed Houses (1999–2004), a series of 30 collage paintings by Jeff Gillette, is a gleeful deconstruction of real estate advertisements set against bucolic landscapes. Like a willful child pulling wings off flies, the artist here has devious fun destroying unaffordable homes — and the pervasive dream of owning one.SFBG
SUBURBAN ESCAPE: THE ART OF CALIFORNIA SPRAWL
Through March 4, 2007
San Jose Museum of Art
110 S. Market, San Jose
Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.
$5–$8
(408) 294-2787
www.sjmusart.org

The Downward Spiral

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by Amanda Witherell

Ezra wanted to see The Departed and I was angling for Borat, so we decided to let public transportation pick the movie and time and just BART to the new Westfield shopping mall at Market and Fourth.

I loathe all malls, but it seemed the Westfield’s theatre had an ample supply of what we were looking for. And I was in a charitable mood, feeling like I could just forget about where the profit from the $10.00 ticket was really going. After catching a train and pinning down a non-popcorn based meal we were, of course, cutting it very close, possibly into preview time (boding well for me and Borat.)

DisemBARTing at Powell Station, we escalated up into the city’s functional levels and directly into the new shopping mall. This is when the Westfield revealed the true fascist nature of its architecture and mission.

Track stars

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“Trolley Dances,” as a friend pointed out, really is a misnomer, at least when applied here: San Francisco’s rail-bound transportation is either on streetcar lines or the underground BART tracks. But “Trolley Dances,” which returned this year for the third time and presented four dance companies in four different venues, gets its name from San Diego, where trolley cars do exist. In Northern California the free event is produced by Kim Epifano’s Epiphany Productions. These relaxed performances are a hit for tourists as well as locals, and they both turned out in respectable numbers — between 60 and 100 at any one station — on the morning of Oct. 20. It was quite a splendid way to spend two balmy mid-October hours in the sun.
If I may nitpick for a moment: those who expected to ride from one performance to the next were happy only if they had walking shoes on. Two of the four locations were reached on foot (at a pretty clipped pace for some of the elderly audience members), and the rest were accessible by Muni, which — surprise, surprise — kept everyone waiting a good 20 minutes. No wonder some lost patience and hoofed it elsewhere. I am not a fan of walking behind a leader hoisting a placard ahead of me, but if I hadn’t done just that, I might never have found my way into the impressively spacious Spear Tower Atrium of One Market Street, site of Yannis Adoniou’s In the Crowd.
With his own Kunst-Stoff dancers Kara Davis and Julian DeLeon in red jumpsuits and 22 dancers from the Lines Repertory Ensemble in black leotards and tops, Adoniou and his crew looked quite at home amid these elegant environs. He took his inspiration from the central aluminum-rod sculpture, arranging his dancers stelalike around it. It was good to see him work with a large ensemble, giving the dancers relatively simple but nicely varied patterns that billowed and contracted to good effect. The excellently paired Davis and DeLeon were the wanderers in this crowd: alone and together, supportive of and indifferent to each other. Carey Lambrecht set the mood — at times quite melancholic — with her solo violin.
Next stop was Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton’s Tzigane, in front of 50 California Street. Tanya Bello, Jennifer Bishop-Orsulak, Nol Simonse, and the multitalented Heidi Schweiker romped through precision dances suggested by the loony music of the Fanfare Ciocarlia, which sounded like a military band that had plopped into a circus. Set tightly to the score, the piece — with performers all in black, including berets — had a bouncy, folk dance quality. Dancers took the lead in setting patterns, splitting courting couples, playing around with hand signals, and bouncing off each other and the surrounding flower boxes. At Tzigane’s core as a reluctantly shy ballerina, Schweiker was coaxed into taking the stage, accompanied by some grandmotherly wailing on the soundtrack.
Next, Seawall: Beneath the Surface, by Facing East Dance and Music, was performed against a glorious view of the bay and anchored boats on Pier 38. With the excellent Vijay Anderson on traps, a sextet of women engaged in fairly conventional partnering and ensemble moves. Seawall’s most intriguing parts came from the juxtaposition of the quintet’s sometimes feverish activity with Rae Chung’s stillness and her ability to place martial arts–like moves with exceptionally directed focus.
Finally, the singer-dancers in Epifano’s Love in Transfer, at the Fourth Street Caltrain Station, may have looked like down-and-out travelers, but their folk music–inspired celebration of community and love “for as long as it lasts” suggested a robustly joyous celebration of community. SFBG

PG&E’s extreme makeover

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› steve@sfbg.com
Mayor Gavin Newsom called a meeting with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. president Thomas King in July to let the utility chief know that the city intended to pursue public power projects on Treasure Island and Hunters Point.
“It was just to tell him that we’re going to do it,” Newsom spokesperson Peter Ragone said of the meeting. “The mayor thought it was a gentlemanly thing to do.”
King used the occasion to start an aggressive new offensive — and to preview PG&E’s latest political strategy.
In an Aug. 10 letter to Newsom, King promised not to fight the city’s plans in court and pledged to develop a better relationship with the city.
“We know that it was in this spirit of cooperation that you approached us last month, and we want to foster this spirit and forge an even stronger partnership in efforts to protect our environment in the years ahead. That’s why I wanted to respond to your questions and suggestions — and to share with you some ideas of my own,” King wrote, listing one of those ideas as helping the city develop energy from tidal power at the mouth of the bay, which Newsom had recently announced a desire to pursue.
The day after PG&E wrote the letter, Newsom and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) head Susan Leal announced the city’s intention to supply public power, mostly from clean solar and hydroelectric sources, to the redevelopment project on Parcel A of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where the politically connected Lennar Corp. (which is also part of the team with the rights to build on Treasure Island) has the contract to build 1,600 new homes.
“What we want to provide is a green community at a rate that meets or beats PG&E,” Leal told the Guardian, noting the history of environmental injustices that have been heaped on the southeast part of town. “We’re very excited about what’s going on at Hunters Point. . . . It’s important that the city do the right thing for that community.”
And just as PG&E was pledging cooperation, it aggressively set out to undermine the city’s plans with competing bids and continued its fiercely adversarial posture in another half-dozen realms in which it must work with the city, battles that have cost San Franciscans millions of dollars.
“This is a competitive world and this is fair game, don’t you think?” PG&E spokesperson Darlene Chiu — who used to be Newsom’s deputy press secretary — told us of company efforts to subvert the public power projects.
Last month PG&E also hired away SFPUC commission secretary Mary Jung, who had been privy to closed-session discussions about various city strategies for dealing with PG&E. Jung, who did not return a call for comment, was required to sign a confidentiality agreement and threatened with criminal charges if she spills city secrets, although city officials acknowledge that would be difficult to prove.
PG&E has also launched a high-profile public relations offensive designed to repackage the utility as a clean and green crusader against global warming and a supporter of community programs such as the mayor’s pet project, SF Connect, to which it contributed $25,000 last month.
“The company has a long and continuing history of fighting against the city rather than working with the city on issues involving municipal power, improved reliability, connecting city facilities, and protecting ratepayers,” Matt Dorsey, a spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, told us. “If PG&E wants to demonstrate its good corporate citizenship, it can start by changing the nature of its relationship with the city.”
BIG BUCKS
If anyone from the Bay Area needs a reminder about the big money, bare-knuckle approach PG&E uses when its interests are threatened, they need only look up the road to what’s happening in Sacramento and Yolo counties.
PG&E has so far spent more than $10 million fighting Propositions H and I in Yolo County and Measure L in Sacramento County, which together would allow the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) to annex more than 70,000 customers in Davis and surrounding communities.
The PG&E effort has saturated mailboxes and the airwaves with messages that inflate the cost of taking over its transmission lines, imply threats of a drawn-out legal battle, and make bold claims of its being an environmentally friendly utility (for example, including nuclear power in its calculations of how “green” PG&E is).
“They’re trying to spread fear and confusion,” Davis-based public power advocate Dan Berman told us. “A new thing comes out every day. But we keep citing the message of lower rates and better service.”
In fact, SMUD has rates that are about 30 percent lower than PG&E’s and a power portfolio that includes significantly more energy from renewable sources than PG&E uses. Even King’s claim that PG&E is “the leading solar utility in the county, having hooked up more than 12,000 solar-generating customers” is misleading. The number is large because PG&E has the largest customer base in the country, but the solar rebates were state mandated and SMUD inspired and come from ratepayer surcharges.
Still, PG&E justifies its aggressive campaign in Yolo County in terms of warding off a hostile takeover of its customers. For residents there and new customers in San Francisco that the SFPUC wants to serve, PG&E’s Chiu repeats the mantra that “we have an obligation to provide services.”
Yet critics of the company say the campaign is about more than just holding on to those customers. Right now more than a dozen California communities are pushing for public power, most involving community choice aggregation (CCA) — which allows cities to buy power on behalf of citizens, potentially bypassing PG&E.
“That’s one of the reasons they’re pulling out all the stops in Davis, because if this goes through, it will embolden other communities,” Barbara George of Women’s Energy Matters told us.
San Francisco was an early city to pursue CCA, but plans to implement it have moved slowly, and now other communities — including Marin County and the cities of Oakland and Berkeley — are even further along.
“San Francisco is way behind in community choice,” George said. “The mayor is giving PG&E a lot of time to put out its claims to be green in order to fight this.”
Part of that push involves a slick 16-page mailer sent out in August by “The New PG&E” outlining “a proposal for an unprecedented and far-reaching partnership with the city of San Francisco to create the cleanest and greenest city in the nation.”
Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — a longtime public power advocate — is skeptical. “I welcome it, but I don’t buy it,” he said. “Their desire to work with us is typically predicated on the receding of our efforts to pursue public power.”
In fact, King seemed to say as much in his letter to Newsom when he wrote, “We see the investment of time, money and political capital in the public power fight as a distraction from the real need — providing clean, reliable and safe power to San Francisco.”
Chiu denied that there is a quid pro quo here, saying, “It is our intent to help San Francisco become clean and green, whether or not it comes with the city’s blessing.”
Yet Leal said the company seems more interested in stopping public power than going green. Rather than trying to undermine the city’s plans for the area, she questioned, “Why don’t they have the rest of Hunters Point, which are already their customers, be a green community?”
COMPETING WITH PG&E
Lennar is expected to announce in the next week or two whether it will go with public power or PG&E at Hunters Point. “No final decision has been made at this point,” Lennar spokesperson Jason Barnett told us.
Yet it didn’t have to be this way. Lennar’s redevelopment project is being subsidized with public funds that could have been conditioned on public power. Even as late as Oct. 17, when the San Francisco Redevelopment Board agreed to change Lennar’s contract to let the company out of building rental units, public power could have been part of the trade-off. Agency chief Marcia Rosen did not return Guardian calls asking why the public agency didn’t take advantage of this leverage.
For her part, Leal said, “I’m not afraid of competition.” It was a point echoed by Ragone, who said Newsom believes the city shouldn’t be afraid to compete with PG&E on Hunters Point or Treasure Island or to stop a PG&E bid to help develop clean tidal power.
But Mirkarimi doesn’t necessary agree. “Why do they have that right?” he asked, arguing the city shouldn’t let PG&E take control of new energy resources or customers who should be served by public power. “The tentacles of PG&E haven’t receded any less at City Hall and we should always be on our guard.”
Leal and Ragone each acknowledged that competing with PG&E isn’t always a fair fight. After all, in addition to having the resources of nearly 10 million customers paying some of the highest rates in the country, PG&E is also alleged in a lawsuit by the city to have absconded with $4.6 billion in ratepayer money during its 2002 bankruptcy, in what Herrera called “an elaborate corporate shell game.” On Oct. 2, the US Supreme Court denied review of a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal ruling favoring the city, sending the case back to the trial court to determine just how much PG&E owes ratepayers.
That is just one of several ongoing legal actions between the city and PG&E, including conflicts over the city’s right to power municipal buildings, PG&E’s hindrance of city efforts to create more solar sites, and battles over the interconnection agreement that sets various charges that the city must pay to use PG&E lines.
MONEY IN ACTION
A good example of PG&E tactics occurred during the July 26 meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which is overseeing work on the Bay Bridge. As part of that work, a power cable going to Treasure Island needed to be moved, but the Treasure Island Development Authority didn’t have the $3.4 million to do it.
So PG&E executive Kevin Dasso showed up at the MTC meeting with a check made out for that amount, offering to pay for the new cable and thus control the power line through which the SFPUC intends to provide public power to the 10,000 residents who will ultimately live on the island.
“This deal with Treasure Island was really egregious. They came in like a game show host and held up a check to try to stop this baby step toward public power on Treasure Island,” said Sup. Tom Ammiano, who also sits on the MTC board. “It shows PG&E is not asleep at the wheel by any means, and anybody who’s elected is going to need to stay vigilant.”
Ammiano was able to persuade the MTC to loan TIDA the money and preserve the city’s public power option. PG&E officials are blunt about their intentions. Chiu said, “We both want to provide power to Treasure Island.” So officials note the importance of being vigilant when it comes to PG&E.
“There will be other meetings where PG&E will wave around $3.4 million checks,” Leal said. “And at some of those meetings, we won’t be there to stop them.”
So public power advocates are concerned that public officials are letting PG&E rehabilitate its public image. Newsom has recently shared the stage with PG&E executives at a green building conference in San Francisco and the Treasure Island ceremony where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the landmark global warming measure that PG&E long opposed before ultimately supporting. Ragone said neither these events nor PG&E’s contribution to SF Connect nor his direct dealings with King indicate any softening of Newsom’s support for public power.
“We’re going to do what’s in the best interests of the city of San Francisco,” Ragone said. “This is the first mayor to support public power, and that hasn’t changed at all.” SFBG
To see the letter from King to Newsom and other documents related to this story, go to www.sfbg.com.

Buried treasure

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Despite the fast-moving urban centers that surround it on each side of the San Francisco Bay, not much about Treasure Island has changed since it was shut down as a United States naval station 10 years ago.
After the feds ceased operations on the island and at several other military installations in the mid-’90s, the idea was to give the land to local governments for redevelopment to fill the economic void of losing active bases. Since then, several plans for Treasure Island have been floated with great fanfare in the press, but all have become mired in the infamously contentious development politics of San Francisco.
Late last month, after three years of deadline extensions, the Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA) finally received a full-blown plan from the developer — a partnership between Lennar Corp., Wilson Meany Sullivan, and Treasure Island Community Development — that was given exclusive negotiating rights over the land three years ago.
The $1.2 billion redevelopment plan must now run a gauntlet of state and local approval, including consideration from the Board of Supervisors, which is expected to hold hearings and debate the plan by the end of the year. It isn’t likely that construction will begin on the island for at least a couple more years.
The latest proposal anticipates about 6,000 new homes, 1,800 of which will be targeted to low-income residents, including 750 units for households earning no more than 60 percent of San Francisco’s median income and 440 built as part of a program for the homeless. Plans include town houses, single-family homes, and high-rise residential towers, although at least half the properties will be limited to 65 feet in height.
Right now the island contains about 800 occupied units, over half of which are market-rate leases with the John Stewart Co., while about 200 are operated under the Treasure Island Homeless Development Initiative. By the time the project is done, according to the newest plan, the island’s population is expected to balloon to around 10,000 residents, plus around 3,000 new workers necessary to maintain the minicity.
Some of the existing housing stock will be demolished, or as the plan calls it, “reconstructed.” Current residents will have an option to move into the new units or be placed in a lottery if demand for certain types of units outstrips the supply. The plan calls for about 27 percent of the overall planned housing units to be rentals.
Private automobile use would be regulated by metering ramp access to the island during peak commute hours; assessing possible congestion fees for driving on the island; limiting residential parking; and emphasizing thruways that promote walking, bicycling, and public transit.
Much of the development is slated for the west side of the island — with its breathtaking and profitable views of the city — near an existing ferry terminal that would provide access to the city all day long.
Treading lightly, Sup. Chris Daly, whose District 6 includes the island, said he supports the environmental and housing components so far, but if existing island residents mount significant opposition for any reason, he’d consider opposing the plan.
“You don’t know how clean something is until you take it out of the wash, and they’re just now starting to throw it in,” Daly told the Guardian.
Rob Black, Daly’s main challenger in the upcoming election, lives on Treasure Island. He was similarly cautious. “I think people have finally begun to think in a more progressive way about making this a more sustainable neighborhood,” Black told us. “Past plans have been so poorly put together.”
On the local level, the plan must be approved in the coming months by both the TIDA board and the Board of Supervisors. After that, it will undergo an extensive environmental impact review by the city’s planning department before returning to the board for final local approval.
The developer and the TIDA board — which is composed entirely of mayoral appointees, three of whom work directly for Mayor Gavin Newsom — must still overcome other major hurdles as well, including the fact that the Navy hasn’t turned over any of the land yet and likely won’t without major concessions.
The Bush administration has stalled the transfer, pushing for some payment before giving up valuable federal land. One tentative option is to relieve the Navy of about $45 million in environmental cleanup costs for which it is currently responsible. Those costs would then be borne by the redevelopment plan and the developer, which has already pledged $26 million for remediation. The land became contaminated in part after decades of military activity that included emergency drills with radioactive materials.
David Rist, a project manager for the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, which is overseeing the cleanup, said that while there is some contamination where residents are living today, it doesn’t pose an immediate threat to human health. Identified contaminants include dioxin, lead, and PCBs. Rist told us the cleanup, regardless of who ends up paying for it, will be “significantly done in the next two and a half years.”
After mulling over ideas, TIDA finally brokered an exclusive deal in 2003 with a company incorporated as Treasure Island Community Development, a group of Democratic Party heavyweights with deep links to the current and former mayoral administrations and other top elected Democrats.
Jay Wallace, a project planner for Treasure Island Community Development, said the plan’s mammoth size and uniqueness have required considerable and time-consuming attention to specifics. Investors anticipate spending $500 million of their own money, but they’re looking to earn upward of $125 million in profits, according to the plan.
The remaining cost of about $760 million for infrastructure, open space, and transportation system improvements could be covered largely by tax increment financing from the redevelopment area and Mello Roos bonds, both of which would essentially be funded by future property taxes, according to the latest term sheet.
Wallace told the Guardian that his group “has worked in good faith and transparency throughout this project, with over 150 public meetings before reaching this milestone and presenting this plan to the city.”
Daly said that while “there are going to be a hundred issues that need to be worked out,” the green-meets-affordable-housing theme “is the right proposal for San Francisco.”
“Political connections to the Newsom juggernaut notwithstanding, these guys are politically savvy enough to know what’s wise and what isn’t,” he said. “On the actual merits of the proposal, it’s palatable if you’re OK with the concept of high-rises in the middle of the bay.” SFBG

Eat your politics

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› culture@sfbg.com
A lot has happened since Californians first rebelled against the canned food and Jell-O molds of the postwar industrialization era. The American food politics revolution is very much alive and well and thriving in the Bay Area, where the movement started. And California is still the food basket of the United States — it’s been the top grower in the country for more than half a century. The dialogue about sustainable growing practices and environmental impact is open, and the fight for more mindful production practices is still on.
We are home to around 100 farmers markets — including Alemany, which, at 63 years old, is the granddaddy of local markets. Alice Waters’s groundbreaking Chez Panisse restaurant celebrated 35 years of organic-minded Epicureanism this year. CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture farms) — started in the United States in the 1980s — are going strong. Local groups and organizations that continue to educate and activate the revolution around here include but certainly aren’t limited to San Francisco Food Systems, Food Not Bombs, Food First, and the Brentwood Agricultural Land Trust, which protects farmland against development. Blogs like the Eat Local Challenge, written by authors across the United States, and resource Web pages like those of the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, the organization that runs the Ferry Building farmers markets, offer a plethora of information about the local food politics movement.
And then there’s Larry Bain — restaurateur, activist, and founder and executive director of Nextcourse. He doesn’t just eat his politics, he feeds them to the Bay Area. Bain has a hand in a few of the finest and fanciest restaurants in town (Acme Chophouse, Jardinière), but his work through Nextcourse in San Francisco jails and schools and with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area narrows “the food divide” and shows how eating well doesn’t mean breaking the bank for artisanal olive oil. We talked to him about his organization and some of the major issues it’s taking on in the quest to bring mindful eating practices to the larger community.
SFBG What inspired you to found Nextcourse?
LARRY BAIN I’ve been a food activist since 1983, when I opened [Zola in San Francisco] with the intention of creating a new model for restaurants. Restaurants use more energy per square foot than any other retail operation, so the consumption of water, gas, electricity, and the generation of greenhouses gases tend to have a very deleterious impact on the environment. Then there’s the cleaning solutions used in restaurants. And the amount of garbage generated, the packing, and then of course the stuff we know and think first about restaurants, where food comes from, the fossil fuels used in the creation and transportation of food. Every year I owned a restaurant, I got more excited about the positive impact restaurants could have and about finding ways to influence other restaurateurs. Because nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “I want to be the cause of 17 trees being felled in the redwood forest.”
But I wasn’t big enough to take it all on. Every issue is far more complex than you’d think. Whether it’s a straightforward Atlantic salmon or a Chilean sea bass, there are layers of impact. Even eating local — what does that do to communities that depend on people in America buying their coffee beans or some other product? I wasn’t sure where to focus until I went to a seminar that was given at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. All of my heroes were up on the stage: Vanda Nashiva, Orville Schell, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, Carlo Petrini. They were being eloquent and brilliant about the future of food and where we needed to be going, touching many things close to my heart.
As always happens at one of those gatherings, some smart-ass stood up and asked, “Excuse me, if we were going to make the transition from conventional to organic tomorrow, would we still be able to feed the world?” It’s the argument always thrown out by Archer Daniels Midland: “This is the only way to feed the world, through genetically modified crops and by conventional methods of distribution. All of this organic stuff is just pie in the sky.” And everybody, all of my heroes said, “Oh yes, organic farming is superproductive. You get a lot more nutrients out of every acre planted.”
Berry said, “We just don’t have enough farmers. If you went to the unemployment office and said, ‘OK, all you three guys over there, tomorrow you’ll be organic farmers’ — it requires tremendous wisdom and experience and we’ve lost that. Before we can talk about changing our food system, we have to be cognizant of the supply, and we don’t have the farmers and we don’t have farmland.” It was at this point that I thought, OK, this is going to be my passion, growing farmers.
I don’t know anything about agriculture. My area of expertise is the world of commerce, and I know what farmers need is a good path to sell their product. And because farmers cannot survive through Chez Panisse alone, they need a broader base of consumers that might be willing to buy things that aren’t as exotic as a $5 peach but greens or even fruit that is delicious but not beautiful.
SFBG Has cooking become some exoticized thing?
LB Elitist thing. People go to the Ferry Building not to buy their food but to accessorize their meals, and so what they’re going to eat is pretty standard stuff that they might get at Safeway or Whole Foods, and then they go to the Ferry Building to get this little bunch of herbs or this little piece of cheese that will make it a special dinner. And so how do you make shopping in farmers markets and cooking for your family more of a way of life rather than a lifestyle. When you’re living in a neighborhood filled with tension and stress and toxic materials, food becomes even more important to help you survive that, to help you keep a strong immune system. So Nextcourse started in the San Francisco county jail working with women who are moms, mostly, and who, once they get out, need to feed their family.
SFBG When did the cooking in jail program start?
LB I got a phone call from a teacher at a school in Emeryville to come and talk to students there about healthy eating. I took the chef and sous-chef from Acme Chophouse, and we cooked with the kids. A friend of mine said this would be a great program at juvie hall. And so I called juvie hall — it was a bureaucratic nightmare. The same friend said, “Well, I know someone who does work at the county jail. She’s a public defender.” So, I called her up and told her, “We want to do cooking classes in the jail. I’ve got these great chefs, and they know how to show people how to cook things that are delicious, nutritious, easy, cheap, fun. Can you help us out?” Within a week we met with the sheriff, who loved the idea.
In the classes, we talk about the importance of nutrition and the how-to. A lot of these women know that eating good food is important for their kids. They know this, and yet they think, “What can I do about this? I can’t afford to go to Whole Foods, and I can’t afford to eat at Chez Panisse.” So we show them where to shop, and every class has a menu. The teacher will shop the day before, both at Safeway or FoodCo or one of these cheap stores and at a farmers market — not at the Ferry Building but at Heart of the City or at Alemany or sometimes just at stores in the Tenderloin. And we line the ingredients up side-by-side and invariably the ingredients from the farmers market, aside from being more nutritious and delicious, are cheaper because we shop seasonally.
All of the cooking takes place with minimal equipment. In the jail we can’t use knives. Everything can be done — a salad, a main course, a vegetable — in 25 minutes, and for less than $5 a person. Cooking quickly is all about being organized. We teach them those skills as well.
SFBG How many women have gone through this program?
LB I think it’s about 750 now. One of the things that we’re moving forward with is finding a way to connect with the women after they leave. One of the new initiatives is working with a postrelease program where there’ll be a kitchen so we’ll be able to do the classes on an ongoing basis.
SFBG Something that a lot of people don’t know is that people who have a felony drug offense can’t get food stamps.
LB It was part of that whole clean up drugs thing. It’s changed slightly so that now if you have a minor drug offense, you can get food, but if you have a heavier felony offense, it’s still not possible. [Assemblymember] Mark Leno is working on fixing it.
SFBG Have you kept in touch with the women from the program?
LB Yeah. We have one woman who found us because we also offer the courses to women who provide day care. She told us, “When I was in jail, I was thinking this was all bullshit. I can’t do that. It’s going to be too expensive. It’s just you white people blowing smoke up our ass. But I got out and now I’m going to the market every week and my kids love it.”
SFBG You’re also coordinating food service for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area?
LB Yes, coordinating purchasing so the prices are better, but also coordinating so some people can get products that there hasn’t been enough demand for. The great thing about McDonald’s is that it represents this huge buying power, and if McDonald’s says, “We want an alternative to Styrofoam,” people say, “OK, we’ll do that.” So when 17 food services here say, “We really want cornstarch knives or sugar-based packaging material” … companies will see this opportunity and figure it out.
I started talking to the people in the national park for two reasons. One is that the park feeds a lot of people. Golden Gate Park is 75,000 acres, the largest urban park in the country, and feeds 17 million people a year, whether they’re dining at Greens, which is a park partner, or the Cliff House or some little café. The park also sits on a tremendous amount of good agricultural land, some of which is being used up at Point Reyes National Park. Cowgirl Creamery, Strauss Dairy, Hog Island Oyster, Sun Farm — all those are on park land. We want the park to become not only a purchaser of good sustainable, healthy food but also a producer.
SFBG One of the reasons why Nextcourse is interesting is that it addresses the “food divide,” actually doing outreach into the community that is not going to show up at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. What do you think needs to be done? It feels like the gap is getting wider rather than narrowing.
LB That just represents what’s happening in our society. Truly, you can’t change the food system without looking at every other aspect of the economic system. You’ve heard it before, but there’s all these wonderful catchphrases like “the high cost of cheap food.” People shouldn’t be asking why this beautiful piece of fruit is so expensive, they should be asking why this other piece of fruit is so cheap. And the reason it’s cheap is because of the way our economy is structured, with lobbies, subsidies, and oil companies having such a strong vested interest. The real problem with food costing “X amount” is that we can’t survive just on food. We need housing, we need education, we need health care. The government is no longer in the public service business: they’ve privatized all of those things, and they’re driven by profit. People can’t afford more expensive food because they’re spending so much on rent, health care, and more expensive schools.
We’ve created a society that’s increasingly divided the rich and the poor. Food is just symbolic. If we want a just society, this is just one aspect — don’t stop at food, but see food as the beginning, a way to engage in a better world.
SFBG What about the conceptual problem? It’s fine to repeat the mantra that cheap food is more expensive, but when it’s not immediately visible …
LB We’re encouraged to not see beyond our own noses. It’s not in the interest of economy for us to think of long-term effects, to see the net. We just see “cheap.” This is the money I have in my pocket at the moment. I’ll worry about the hospital when I have to go to a hospital, and in fact, it’s best not to think about that. So in order for things to change, food people need to see that while they need to collaborate among the food community, they also need to collaborate among the social justice community as a whole. The food community has to see that people struggling for immigration rights, workers’ rights, health care rights are their natural friends.
SFBG What are some organizations around the Bay Area that are doing good work?
LB On a really grassroots level, I think la Cocina is fantastic — an industrial kitchen facility that brings in mostly Latina women with the hope that they’ll be able to have their own kitchen or restaurant someday. The Columbia Foundation, particularly through their Roots of Change program. Something new to the Bay Area is the Community Alliance for Family Farmers that is trying to bridge the gap between farms and urban centers.
SFBG What are the top issues facing the Bay Area — in terms of food and our ecology — in the next decade?
LB The offshoring of our food production. It’s going to happen unless we start yelling and screaming, because it is so much cheaper to grow and produce food in developing nations. A lot of these agribusiness companies want to get out of the US. They want to be someplace where there are no labor laws, there are no environmental restrictions. That’s what keeps me up at night. I wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “They’re offshoring our food production.”
Environmentally, water is the biggest issue that we’re facing. What’s happening is that farmers are saying, ‘I could sell my water for much more money than I could ever make growing food.’ Because all of our communities, particularly those built in deserts, are so desperate for water that they will pay anything for it. So as water becomes more politically contentious and expensive, anybody doing agriculture will go someplace where there isn’t necessarily more water but they can get it for free or get it illegally. SFBG

Snakes in vain

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› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I’m the only geek in San Francisco who didn’t go to the drunken flash mob event at 1000 Van Ness where Snakes on a Plane played in dangerous proximity to cartloads of extremely stiff, free drinks. My sources tell me that outrageous costumes were worn; somebody brought a real live snake; and there were many inebriated screams that included the epithet “motherfuckin’ snakes on a motherfuckin’ plane!” Was it glorious dork anarchy? Or was it something more sinister — the kind of media-engineered, snake-eating-its-own-long-tail event that Bill Wasik claims he invented the “flash mob” to parody?
Believe me, I would have been there toasting the motherfucking snakes if I could have been. But Birthing of Millions was playing at Edinburgh Castle, and no amount of serpents and spirits could drag me away from Brian Naas on guitar. So now that we’ve established my complicity in the Snakes meme thing, despite my absence on opening night, we can proceed.
Snakes on a Plane became an Internet geek phenomenon, rather than a pleasure reserved solely for dorks who like bad movies, for the same reasons that the Star Wars kid or the Hamster Dance became Internet phenomena. In short, it was weird and stupid and fun. One day neuropsychologists may discover an area in the brain that lights up when we watch home movies of teenagers fighting with light sabers — or campy action heroes battling snakes. But for now, Snakes’ online popularity can only be explained via cultural analysis.
Bloggers began leaking information about this movie with a deliciously literal-minded title more than a year ago, hailing it as a masterpiece of cheese. It had all the ingredients required for hip ironic consumption: Samuel L. Jackson, an airplane disaster, and a bunch of retro, analog-era monsters (snakes — without CGI!). Soon news about the flick was all over the Net. Some of its popularity was probably inspired by everybody’s frustration with Transportation Security Administration regulations and long lines in airports. Who hasn’t wanted to yell something about motherfucking snakes on motherfucking planes after being made to take off jackets, shoes, belts, earrings, and hats during the holiday rush in an airport, when the floor is covered in muddy, melted snow? (As if to underscore this association, a parody TSA announcement about banning snakes from planes was circuutf8g in blogland last week.)
Internet fascination with the film reached critical mass last year when New Line Cinema threatened to rename it Pacific Air Flight 121 and Jackson convinced them to keep the original. At that point, references to the movie were so commonplace on the Internet that the studio decided to promote it more, beef it up with extra footage, and add a line to the script that had actually been invented by Web fans imagining what Jackson’s legendary Pulp Fiction character Jules would say: “That’s it! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” In response, the fans went utterly nuts. The people in movieland were listening to the people in blogland! When this movie comes out, let’s get totally motherfucking drunk and buy a million tickets!
As Quinn Norton pointed out on her blog, it’s important to remember that nobody actually expected to like this movie. To the extent that we do like Snakes, we’re getting pleasure out of it as a joke — a joke on itself for being so flagrantly silly, but also the butt of jokes we’ve made for the past year online. Of course, there’s the less-acknowledged joke Snakes plays on us when we buy tickets to see a movie that can never be as cool or creative as the videos, songs, posters, and satires people have already published about it for free on the Internet.
Trying to imitate the strategy that led to Snakes’ prerelease buzz, the SciFi Channel recently invited its fans to name an upcoming made-for-TV movie “about a giant squid.” Haven’t heard of Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep? Maybe it’s because the name the SciFi folks picked was exactly the sort of dopey thing they’d normally slap on a story about sea monsters. Apparently they passed over some ideas that might actually have gotten them the hipster cachet that Snakes garnered for New Line. Among the discarded titles were Killamari and Tentacles 8, Humans 2.
I vaguely thought that I should go see Snakes, or at least set the DVR to catch Kraken. But the fact is, I’d rather watch all the YouTube parodies tonight.SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who would be happy to buy tickets to see Sharks on a Roller Coaster.

After oil

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OPINION Every day a river of cars flows across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, bringing workers, tourists, and visitors to the city. Nearly all run on petroleum fuels. Every day a staccato procession of planes lands at SFO, bringing tourists, conventioneers, and returning residents. All fly on petroleum fuels. Every day a phalanx of trucks delivers food to grocery stores, restaurants, and corner markets. All run on petroleum fuels. Every day roads are paved, potholes are filled, roofs are tarred, machinery is lubricated, and tires are replaced. All are done with petroleum-derived products. Every day hundreds of thousands of purchases take place, every one enabled by petroleum.
What will happen when the petroleum behind all these activities costs $100 a barrel? $200 a barrel? Or more? San Francisco’s viability as a major West Coast city is based on cheap petroleum. But the century of cheap petroleum is quickly coming to an end, and an era of expensive, scarce oil is dawning. Just as US production of oil peaked in 1970, production of oil from an increasing number of other countries has peaked as well. Currently, 33 of the top 48 major oil producers in the world are in irreversible decline, among them the United Kingdom, Norway, Mexico, and Indonesia. Within a few years — and indeed some claim it has already happened — global oil production will peak, then begin a protracted decline. The consequences are unthinkable. A world — and a city — built on cheap petroleum faces the largest challenge of modern times.
Nothing exists that can seamlessly replace petroleum. For transport, ethanol and biodiesel have been touted but both require tremendously higher levels of energy inputs for production compared to petroleum, and the competition with food production is already apparent with the rising price of corn in the Midwest. For other uses — lubrication, paving, plastics, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, inks, solvents, detergents, rubber, and thousands more — no drop-in substitute is remotely ready. Alternate sources — such as the tar sands of Canada — produce in net only a half barrel of oil for every barrel of energy consumed. As petroleum production reaches its peak, every aspect of our lives will be profoundly impacted.
What can be done? First, it’s important to understand the phenomenon. Peak oil is not an oil company conspiracy, nor is it the result of OPEC’s actions — this is the result of a century and a half of ever-rising exploitation of a finite energy source. Second, we need to examine how we use energy in San Francisco to determine ways to either reduce consumption or find nonfossil alternatives to supply it. We need to examine our food supply — completely dependent on petroleum for planting, harvesting, processing, and transporting — along with city operations and residential, commercial, and transportation requirements to assess their vulnerability in an era of rising energy prices.
In April, San Francisco became the first major city in the United States to pass a peak-oil resolution, and on July 28 the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission held the first in a series of hearings on the issue of peak oil. Over the next year the commission will hold additional public hearings to educate and inform the citizenry of San Francisco on peak oil and will be launching a study to identify the possible responses we can take. SFBG
Ross Mirkarimi
Sup. Ross Mirkarimi represents San Francisco District 5.

Presidio bust

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› amanda@sfbg.com
Can the Presidio Trust afford to listen to its neighbors? If not, it may just find city officials willing to play hardball over a controversial housing project.
Look at a map of San Francisco. Look closely at the northwestern corner: there are 1,491 acres of federally owned and operated land occupying about 20 percent of the city’s space. The Presidio is a bounty of beauty — miles of hiking trails and bike paths, beaches, bluffs, and greenways maintained by the National Park Service and available for San Francisco and its guests to enjoy.
Unfortunately, the city doesn’t have much say about what happens within that acreage. The property is managed by the Presidio Trust, an independent entity formed in 1996, two years after the park service took control of the former Army base. The trust began with the lofty mission “to preserve and enhance the natural, cultural, scenic, and recreational resources of the Presidio for public use.” It also had a tough mandate: financial independence by 2013.
While the park service tends to the trees and the grass, the 768 buildings scattered throughout the property fall into the purview of the trust, which has rehabilitated and leased 350 of the historic structures in the last 10 years. More than 100 remain on the list for a makeover and one in particular has become a poster child for the strained relationship between the trust and the city in which it lives.
The trust’s Board of Directors has been presented with four development alternatives for the Presidio’s Public Health Service Hospital Complex — 400,000 square feet of dilapidated buildings high on a hill at the southern edge of the Presidio, just 100 yards from the single-family homes that line the quiet avenues north of Lake Street, in the city’s jurisdiction.
For three years, the people who live in those homes have been advocating for developing only 275,000 square feet of the PHSH for smaller units that would house about 438 people and, they say, create less traffic in the neighborhood and environmental impact on the park.
At the last public PHSH meeting on June 15, nearly 200 people representing interests as varied as the Sierra Club and the Mayor’s Office voiced opposition. There was almost universal advocacy of “Alternative 3” (see table, page 14) or some sort of smaller development more in character with the neighborhood. There are currently only five dwellings in the Richmond district with more than 50 units, and the largest has 85.
The trust staff has consistently recommended “Alternative 2,” a plan for 230 market-rate, multibedroom apartments. After three years of neighborhood input and agitation, spokesperson Dana Polk told the Guardian, “This represents a compromise.” The original plan called for 350 units but was still the same size.
To the neighbors it represents a doubling of profit for the trust and its partner in the deal, Forest City Enterprises. Claudia Lewis, president of the Richmond Presidio Neighbors, wrote in a 16-page letter addressed to the board, “The difference in revenue between Alternative 2 and 3 is only $540,000, less than 1 percent of the trust’s projected annual revenue for the year 2010. For this modest gain, the trust is willing to sacrifice the adjacent habitats and community.”
The developer’s projected revenue has leaped from $2.8 million to $6.5 million with the “downsizing,” and the trust’s cut from a 75-year lease has gone from $253 million to $685 million. Forest City, the Cleveland-based real estate developer with a net worth of $8 billion, is only willing to renovate all 400,000 square feet of the building. If another alternative were chosen by the board, trust officials say there would not be a developer interested in the project.
Development in a national park is a lot easier than in the city: There are no restrictive city codes, no process of appeal, and no profit lost in social subsidies. Developers don’t even have to build low-income housing, as the city requires of all projects through its inclusionary housing ordinance.
“They have nothing, zero, no affordable housing in there,” District 1 Sup. Jake McGoldrick told the Guardian. “It’s just more expensive, market-rate housing. I would think they would want to be in sync with what we do on the other side of the road,” he said. “They ought to really address affordable housing voluntarily, as a good neighbor gesture. There’s no reason they can’t rethink the whole thing. How much profit do you really need to turn?”
In the “Response to Comments” on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement of the project, published in May 2006, project proponents argue, “Alternative 3 is, at best, marginally feasible as a rental project because it would not generate a sufficient return to induce a developer to undertake the project.”
PHSH is one of the last remaining large-scale renovations for the Presidio, and in order for development to be financially sufficient, trust staff says, it must net the trust at least $1 million annually in base rent. “That’s why the Public Health Hospital is a key project,” said trust representative Dana Polk. “For us, this is one of the only options for that kind of revenue.”
From a strictly economic standpoint, the Presidio Trust is in the real estate business. Since its creation by Congress in 1996, it’s been fixing up property to lease for the profit necessary to operate the park. In addition to Grubb, the six other Bush-appointed members represent a wealth of experience in real estate, investment banking, law, and finance. They know how to make money but not necessarily how to build a Presidio that works well for San Francisco.
It cost $43 million to operate the Presidio in fiscal year 2004–2005 — and that’s just to keep the lights on and the doors open. In that same fiscal year, the trust received $56 million from residential and commercial rentals, with George Lucas cutting the largest rent check, for $5.6 million. After the additional revenue from PHSH, that $56 million isn’t expected to change much and, according to Presidio spokesperson Polk, certainly won’t double with the 40 percent of Presidio square footage that remains to be renovated.
Since its inception, the trust has received an annual financial allowance from the federal government as assistance while it attempts to achieve fiscal sovereignty. That amount, $19.2 million last year, will steadily decrease to zero by 2013, when the trust is scheduled to sever ties with the US Treasury. It has already exhausted the $50 million borrowing power it was also granted, so for the next seven years it only has what it can raise philanthropically or attract economically to rehabilitate the remainder of the park.
While the trust can occasionally handle retrofits and small-scale renovations, buildings like the PHSH and the cluster of barracks at Fort Scott aren’t entirely feasible as in-house projects. “If we had the capital, we’d do it ourselves,” said Polk, who explains that in most scenarios the lessee incurs the cost of renovations in lieu of rent, which also explains why that $56 million isn’t expected to grow much: Rent revenues are disappearing as favors for renovations.
None of the Presidio property can be sold. It must be leased, but if the trust isn’t raising enough revenue to finance its own public interest renovations, what kinds of development can be expected to continue? Who is willing to pony up cash for buildings they can never own? What kind of bank finances loans on property that can never be foreclosed? Only enormous real estate firms with very deep pockets such as Forest City can afford the Presidio scenario.
In the next couple weeks, McGoldrick is hoping to gather reps from the Mayor’s Office, Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office, the California Department of Transportation, and the local Transportation Authority’s office to try and reach a compromise between what the city needs and what the trust wants.
“One of the problems is they still have an objective to get as much money out of this project as possible,” said McGoldrick. “They should pause and consider trying to get 70 or 80 percent of that $1 million. They should find some way to find the other $300,000. They should find some way to be a good neighbor.”
Otherwise, the city may have to find some way to be a bad neighbor. There’s still a threat on the table to close portions of 14th and 15th Avenues — literally locking the Presidio’s gate to the city — which would severely cripple access to the PHSH. McGoldrick, whose district abuts the southern edge of the Presidio, put forward that resolution along with Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier two years ago.
Although McGoldrick still considers it a possibility, he told us, “Let’s hope we don’t have to go there.” SFBG

…And some bad

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› steve@sfbg.com
Bicycle projects in San Francisco — from the ambitious Blue Greenway initiative to new bike lanes to the simple shared-lane arrows, or “sharrows,” that have been painted on some roadways — have been shut down by a preliminary injunction that Judge James Warren signed as one of his final actions before retiring.
The ruling is part of a lawsuit brought by Rob Anderson, a 63-year-old dishwasher, blogger (whose District 5 Diary regularly blasts the “bike nuts” and “anticar activists”), and failed District 5 supervisorial candidate. Anderson and two groups he formed — Ninety-Nine Percent (referring to those who he believes don’t ride bicycles) and Coalition for Adequate Review — last year sued the city over its Bicycle Plan, arguing that it should have received more rigorous environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
Unless the injunction is overturned, city officials are prohibited from making any physical changes contemplated by the plan until completion of a trial that’s set to begin Sept. 13. The Bicycle Plan, which California cities must update every five years to qualify for certain public funds, was unanimously approved by the Board of Supervisors and signed by the mayor last year.
City officials and bicycle advocates were shocked by the scope of Warren’s ruling. “This is big. It’s means nothing new for bikes for probably the next year,” said Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “It’s pretty strict, even worse than we feared.”
Beyond the prohibition of “installing bicycle lanes on any street in San Francisco named or described in any part of the plan and its maps” and a range of other physical changes, the ruling says the city can’t pursue plans to allow more bikes on public transit. Anderson and attorney Mary Miles didn’t get everything they wanted, such as an end to the city’s “educational or training programs, enforcement activities, or promotional activities,” but that was small consolation to city officials.
“We’re disappointed with the injunction and we disagree with Judge Warren’s conclusions,” said Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office. Dorsey said the lawsuit and injunction defy the spirit of CEQA, as well as its specific exemptions for bike lanes on public streets. “Bikes are already allowed the use of all the streets in San Francisco.”
But Anderson said the Bike Plan should have been subjected to a full-blown environmental impact report before being approved, rather than a finding of exemption from such review, as the board ruled.
“This is not about the contents of the plan itself. It is about the process,” Anderson told the Guardian.
But Anderson’s arguments go well beyond process and bureaucratic details — instead they are driven by what appears to be deep animosity toward the bicycle community, which he has expressed on his blog and in public comments during city meetings.
“I think cycling in the city is dangerous and foolish,” Anderson told us. “It’s irresponsible for the city to encourage an inherently dangerous activity.”
Despite that danger Anderson said he doesn’t believe the city should be building bike lanes or pursuing other safety measures because only a very small percentage of city residents will ever ride bikes. He said that bicyclists are nothing but “an elitist special interest.”
Anderson refused to identify who’s helping to fund his suit or other members of his organization, except to say it’s a “small group” that mostly drives cars. (Anderson said he relies mostly on public transit and walking.) Although he said he believes in global warming and decries traffic congestion, he doesn’t believe bikes are a reasonable form of alternative transportation.
“It’s a progressive fantasy. Bicycles are not the answer to any problem. This is America, not Amsterdam. There are big cars and lots of them,” Anderson told us.
Yet city officials remain uniformly committed to promoting bicycling.
On June 23, Mayor Gavin Newsom issued a public statement saying, in part, “Despite Judge Warren’s preliminary injunction, I remain committed to making San Francisco a national leader for bicycle transportation. Our goal is to increase the number of bike trips in the city to reach 10 percent of all trips by 2010. My administration will do everything within our power to reach that goal.” SFBG
www.district5diary.blogspot.com

Swanson beats Russo

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By G.W. Schulz
With all districts reporting, Sandré Swanson has overcome Oakland city attorney John Russo by 7 percentage points in his primary bid for the 16th Assembly District, which Wilma Chan has held since 2000 and is out due to term limits. District 16 otherwise looks to be uncontested in the general election.
Russo served on the Oakland City Council during the 90s before becoming that Oakland’s first elected city attorney after Jerry Brown’s strong-mayor initiative put the office out for a vote. He made a name for himself in part by filing a nuisance action against Caltrans to force the transportation agency to clean up trash and debris along its properties and by taking on “problem liquor stores.”

Party on

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› amanda@sfbg.com

"San Franciscans will still be able to enjoy their beer in the park at the event," an elated Robbie Kowal told the Guardian on the afternoon of June 2, fresh out of a meeting in which the Mayor’s Office brokered a deal to save the North Beach Jazz Fest.

The event had been jeopardized by the May 30 decision by the Recreation and Park Commission to uphold a move by its staff and Operations Committee to deny the sale of alcohol in Washington Square Park. The San Francisco Examiner even erroneously declared the event dead on its June 1 cover.

But the Mayor’s Office intervened and hosted a long day of negotiations among the event organizers — Kowal, Alistair Munroe, and John Miles — and representatives from the commission, the Rec and Park staff, and the San Francisco Police Department.

In keeping with the commission’s May 30 decision, alcohol will not be sold in the park but on the street adjacent to the park in a gated beer garden. A portion of the park will be designated for people wishing to enjoy a glass of beer or wine while remaining near the live music.

"We’ve worked something out that allows everyone to move forward and the commission to stand by its policy," Yomi Agunbiade, general manager of the Rec and Park Department, told us.

"It doesn’t change the nature of the event," said Kowal, who had been concerned that a change in practice from minibars in the park to beer gardens in the streets would deter festivalgoers and detract from the general enjoyment of the event.

The organizers were prepared to fight for their vision of the festival and had filed an appeal with the commission to review the issue. Without the sale of alcohol, the festival anticipated losing between $20,000 and $40,000, enough to potentially necessitate calling the whole show off.

But after nearly four hours of public testimony at the last meeting about the jazz fest and the North Beach Festival, commissioners weren’t too excited about another round and were pushing for a compromise. "Everybody was interested in making sure the jazz festival folks knew the event was supported and that we wanted it to stay," said Agunbiade. "The right people were in the room."

Yet those not in the room were the North Beach NIMBYs who forced the booze ban, and it’s unclear how they’ll react to the decision. Event organizers around the city have been closely following the North Beach situation, concerned that it was the start of a conservative trend in policy and a new wave of intolerance for alcohol consumption in public (see "The Death of Fun," May 24).

Commissioner Jim Lazarus cited the inherent dangers of a hard-line policy, telling the Guardian, "The precedent could be very bad. I don’t know how we’re going to deal with it at other parks."

The San Francisco Outdoor Events Coalition, a newly formed group of events organizers and promoters, has been calling for a hold on radical changes in policy until after the summer festival season, and it seems as though that call has finally been answered at City Hall.

"What we all have learned from this process was we should have communicated earlier," Agunbiade said after the meeting. "What we will do after events are over this year is sit down and discuss any changes more in depth and evaluate how it went."

Agunbiade said they will be looking at each festival on a case-by-case basis and will try to work with the individual needs of the venues and events. He added that they plan to "communicate a lot sooner and a lot more often to make sure these kinds of situations don’t occur."

The compromise for the jazz fest has been extended to the North Beach Festival as well, but promoter Marsha Garland faces other obstacles. After the commission denied her festival a permit for booze sales in the park, Garland received permission from the Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation for additional beer gardens on the street.

But that decision has been appealed by Anthony Gantner, a local lawyer and president of the North Beach Merchants Association (rival to Garland’s North Beach Chamber of Commerce, which hosts the North Beach Festival).

Garland says she won’t breathe a sigh of relief until after the ISCOTT hearing June 8, just a week before the festival. SFBG

Newsom loses control

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› steve@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balance of power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free-market policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backlash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rippling out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s in charge?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From ANWR to SF

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OPINION For more than a decade, the oil industry and environmentalists have fought over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska.

At the same time, polarizing debate has raged in San Francisco over automobiles in Golden Gate Park, with the proposed car-free Saturday on JFK Drive as the latest iteration.

While ANWR is a long way from San Francisco, that fight has a lot in common with the debate over car-free Saturdays. Both the ANWR and car-free Saturday debates include an enormous expenditure of political capital to confront or defend a lifestyle based on unlimited use of personal cars. And while Gavin Newsom’s veto of car-free Saturday legislation tells us a lot about our ambitious mayor, it also gives us a lens into what he might be like as a future US Senator voting on ANWR drilling.

In ANWR, the debate is whether wilderness should be opened to drilling in order to wean the nation from foreign oil and to save American motorists from inconvenient gas price increases. In short, it is about accommodating a way of life centered on unlimited personal car use — instead of reducing our need for oil by switching to compact urbanism, mass transit, walking, and bicycling.

In Golden Gate Park, the debate centers on a way of life based on unfettered free parking and high-speed "cut-thru" streets like JFK Drive, versus a way of life that reduces car dependency and celebrates urbanism and nature at the same time. While the city and its mayor promote a green image, a small group of wealthy interests maintain that cars simply have to be a central part of our lives and a primary means of transportation, particularly in cities. Moreover, they envision the car-free Saturdays as a dangerous step toward other citywide proposals, such as reducing the space for cars on the streets to prioritize mass transit and bicycles, or perhaps restricting cars on Market Street. Those are the real stakes in this debate.

Like forbidding drilling in ANWR, restricting cars in parts of Golden Gate Park would symbolize a victory for a specific vision centered on reducing the role of automobiles in everyday life.

It is difficult to know how Gavin Newsom would vote on ANWR if he were elected to the US Senate — a position for which he is no doubt being groomed — upon the retirement of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. But in light of his veto of car-free Saturdays, it is worth pondering that with this veto Newsom reveals he could be persuaded to come down on the wrong side in one of America’s most controversial environmental debates, and support drilling in Alaska.

Imagine that 10 years from now, oil prices and global conflict over oil have intensified. A delusional motoring public in California demands relief from its senator (who as mayor did very little to truthfully address problems of automobile dependency in San Francisco). Republicans will be pointing at the offshore oil in California, and Newsom, a Democrat having just been elected to replace the retired Feinstein, will be challenged to provide relief. Would Newsom, out of desperation, support drilling in ANWR to avoid drilling in California?

Actions speak louder than words, and what Newsom has done this week is to set San Francisco up for another decade of automobile dependency without offering any viable alternative. SFBG

Jason Henderson

Jason Henderson is an assistant professor of geography at San Francisco State University.

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Editor’s Note

The Healthy Saturdays folks were out leafleting in Golden Gate Park this weekend, on a stunningly beautiful Sunday, along with thousands of other people enjoying the car-free sunshine. The message on the handouts: Call the mayor (554-7111); the supervisors have approved a plan to at least try extending the car ban to Saturday, and now it’s in the mayor’s court.

Which will be interesting, as Steven T. Jones reports on page 19, because Gavin Newsom thinks of himself as an environmentalist who is pro-bicycle and pro–public transportation — but the people who were a big part of his political base from day one are upper-crust de Young Museum types who, for their own selfish reasons, don’t want the roads in the park closed.

De Young Museum baroness Dede Wilsey and Ken Garcia, the San Francisco Examiner‘s resident crank, are the chief architects of the argument that the Saturday road closure is a bad idea. They’re pushing this God-and-the-flag line — "let the voters decide" — and claiming that since a similar plan lost at the ballot once, only a public referendum would be adequate authority for a rather simple land-use decision. Put it to the voters, they say; that’s fair, right?

Well, I’m not here to dis American democracy or anything, but there’s a little secret I want to share: Most elections aren’t fair. Anytime the size of the electorate is larger than about 40,000 voters (a typical San Francisco supervisorial district), you can’t effectively communicate your message without a big chunk of money — and the larger the jurisdiction, the more money it takes.

Consider California.

There are three major candidates for governor, and all of them are wealthy people. But only two are truly, obscenely, stinking rich, with wealth in the $100 million–plus range, and they are, right now, the odds-on favorites to make the November final — in large part because of their abilities to put personal wealth into the race. In other words, if you want to run for governor of California, being rich — garden-variety rich — isn’t nearly enough.

The same goes for San Francisco, on a different sort of scale. If citywide elections were fair, and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. didn’t have the ability to write a blank check every time an activist group tried to pass a public-power measure, San Francisco would have kicked out the private-power monopoly half a century ago. If citywide elections were fair, and Gavin Newsom didn’t have the ability to outspend Matt Gonzalez by a factor of about 6 to 1, the odds are at least even that Gonzalez would be mayor today.

That’s why Dede Wilsey and Ken Garcia, who both know better, are blowing some sort of smoke when they call for a "vote of the people."

But maybe we should call their bluff. How’s this for a deal:

The museum folks have plenty of money, so Wilsey can raise, say, $200,000. Then she can split it in half — she gets $100,000, and the road-closure activists get $100,000. No outside, "independent" expenditures (they can control their side, and we can control ours), no tricks, no bullshit. Level playing field, fair election — and let’s see who can walk more precincts and turn out more people on election day. That same model would work for all kinds of civic disputes.

Fair?

PS: As an in-line skater with plenty of bruises to prove it, I have another suggestion: For even-more-healthy Saturdays, maybe they could resurface the roads. SFBG

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