Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

*UPDATED 8/15* Tables turned: Department of Education finds City College’s accreditors out of compliance

Erica Hanna
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23
*UPDATED 8/15* Tables turned: Department of Education finds City College’s accreditors out of compliance

UPDATE 8/15, 7PM: The U.S. Department of Education got back to the Guardian to explain their letter in further detail, answering the questions “Can the Department of Ed. reverse the decision to revoke City College’s accreditation?” and “How likely is it that the ACCJC will be closed by the Department of Ed.?”

Their answers, via spokesperson Jane Glickman: “The Department does not have the authority to require an agency to change any accreditation decision it has made.  The agency (ACCJC) needs to amend its policies and procedures and provide documentation that it follows its amended policies and procedures to demonstrate that it is in compliance with the cited criteria. During the past few years, a small number of agencies have withdrawn from the recognition process after having been found out of compliance with a large number of criteria rather than facing a decision to deny their request for a renewal of recognition. A few agencies have had their recognition limited for a period of time.”

And how likely is i the ACCJC will be closed? “The language in the letter is standard whenever we find an agency out of compliance with any criteria because of the statutory requirements.  The process in this case is that ACCJC will have an opportunity to provide information about the steps it has taken to come into compliance with the cited criteria in its response to the draft staff analysis of the agency’s petition for renewal of its recognition, which is currently under review. The Assistant Secretary is required to make a decision within 90 days of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) meeting.  The meeting is scheduled for mid December.   Possible decisions include:
* continuing the agency’s recognition and requiring the agency to come into compliance with the cited criteria within 12 months and to submit a compliance report 30 days thereafter for review (as described above)
* limiting the agency’s recognition in some way
* denying the request for renewal of recognition
In making such a decision, the Assistant Secretary would take into consideration the severity of the compliance issues and potential impact on the agency’s being a reliable authority as to the quality of the education provided by the entities it accredits.  It would not be based merely on the number of citations.” END UPDATE

City College had its accreditation revoked by the Accrediting Commission of Junior and Community Colleges this past July, and now the ACCJC is getting a taste of its own medicine — its own existence has been threatened over its treatment of City College.

[Editor’s Note: This story may have major implications as far as City College’s future accreditation status. We posted this ASAP, but will be adding more information from sources as the news develops. Refresh this page for the newest info.]

In a letter to the accrediting commission of the West, the ACCJC, the Department of Education found it out of compliance with the (Education) Secretary’s Criteria for Recognition, a set of national education standards all accrediting bodies are held to. 

And the ACCJC’s non-compliance with those four standards could lead to its termination. 

From the letter: “Therefore, we have determined that in order to avoid initiation of an action to limit, suspend or terminate ACCJC’s recognition, ACCJC must take immediate steps to correct the areas of non-compliance in this letter.”

The DOE found the accrediting commission, ACCJC, noncompliant in four areas: A conflict of interest as the president, Barbara Beno, had her husband serve on the visiting team that evaluated City College, no clear policies on who should serve on those teams, no clear distinction between “deficiencies” and “recommendations,” and what the severity level for those would be, and for not following their own policies on a two-year timeframe to correct those deficiencies. 

Krista Johns, vice president of policy and research at the ACCJC, talked to the Guardian, painting the DOE letter in a positive light.

“The overall result of the US departments analysis and study of the documents presented by the CFT about the ACCJC really affirmed that we are in compliance to a very large degree with all of the many regulations that touch on accreditors,” Johns said.

The California Federation of Teachers had a different take on the letter. “We are gratified that the U.S. Dept. of Education agreed with us that the process was deeply flawed, and we call on the ACCJC to rescind its unprecedented decision to deny accreditation to CCSF,” wrote CFT President Joshua Pechthalt, in a press release. 

But will the DOE’s findings halt the decision to revoke City College’s accreditation? That’s the $200 million question, and its all too soon to have any decisions drawn yet, said Paul Feist, spokesperson for the State Community College Chancellor’s Office.

“We’re still analyzing the letter. Theres a lot in there,” he said. “I don’t know if it could say there is any reprieve (for City College). Regardless there are a number of problems with City College that need fixing.”

But even a cursory analysis of the letter reveals something that could truly turn everything around: The DOE letter could be seen as saying that the institution is out of compliance with its own policies, which is huge. And it raises the question of why the ACCJC chose to go beyond its own policies to sock it to City College.

The letter basically says that the ACCJC treated “deficiencies” found in 2012 with enough gravity to begin revoking the college’s accreditation, but did not find them serious enough to follow its own procedure of only allowing two years to correct those same deficiencies, which the ACCJC found in 2006.

Basically, the ACCJC is contradicting itself, the DOE wrote, leading to the question: “Were they even deficiencies in the first place?”

“The agency cannot treat an issue serious enough to require reporting and to be part of the rationale for the show cause order, but not serious enough to enforce the timeframe to return to compliance, as required by federal regulation,” the report reads. “The commission has not demonstrated appropriate implementation of this regulation. Allowing an institution to be out-of-compliance with any standard for more than two years is not permissible within 602.20(a)of the Secretary’s Criteria for Recognition.” 

Notably, the ACCJC’s own bylaws, under Article XI, Section 7, a college could appeal its accreditation decision if “there were errors or omissions in carrying out prescribed procedures on the part of the evaluation team and/or the Commission which materially affected the Commission’s action.”

In plain english, if the ACCJC messed up on enforcing its own policies, City College may get a pass on its accreditation decision.

The ACCJC responded to the allegation in its press release, saying “the (DOE) has determined the ACCJC should have taken adverse action on CCSF sooner after the 2006 evaluation review…However, the Commission feels it acted in a timely fashion.”

 

The accrediting commission denied that it violated any of its policies, and said the text of their bylaws would make it hard to use the DOE letter to make an appeal to reverse their decision to close City College. 

 

“The important part (of the appeals process bylaws) is ‘which materially affected the Commission’s action,’” Johns, from the ACCJC said. She said any error on the ACCJC’s part would need to be seen as having enough gravity to have affected their decision making process. 

And the independent panel that oversees the appeals process is actually chosen by Dr. Barbara Beno, president of the ACCJC, and a few other colleagues on the commission.

The commission gets to choose and appoint the people who investigate themselves, essentially.

When asked if this looked like a conflict of interest baked into the system, Johns disagreed. 

“This is fully in line with regulations and practice of accreditation, she said, adding “The institution (City College) does have the right to challenge any hearing members for cause.”

The college’s appeal ultimately is in the hands of the new Super Trustee of City College, Bob Agrella, who acts with all of the powers of the college’s now defunct board. But Agrella has, in past interviews, agreed with the way the ACCJC is run. 

“I think the way the commission operates is OK,” he told Sara Bloomberg, of City College’s newspaper, The Guardsman. “I’ve dealt with their policies and operating procedures at other institutions where I worked that were dealing with addressing accreditation problems—not to the same degree as here at City College—and the process worked there.” 

The non-compliance was discovered after the California Federation of Teachers, working with City College’s teacher union, the AFT 2121, filed a nearly 300-page legal complaint against the ACCJC with the Department of Education, alleging that the accrediting commission had conflicts of interest in evaluating City College and did not follow its own policies or procedures. But as the battle over the ACCJC’s verdict to revoke City College’s accreditation raged on, a split erupted in the college.

Half of the college rallied with groups like Save CCSF, calling the decision about City College unjust. Another half of the college basically said “sit down and shutup,” calling the protests and legal filings unwarranted, sour grapes, and a crazy conspiracy theory. 

 

Even local media outlets have played it mostly straight, and generally have not held the ACCJC’s feet to the fire. The Guardian however published many articles, such as “Who Killed City College?” pointing out irregularities in the ACCJC’s process. 

 

People like Karen Saginor, the ex-City College academic senate president, long fought the ACCJC decision and now feel vindicated. 

“Its pretty exciting, that letter,” Saginor told the Guardian. “Its recognition from an important authority that there are irregularities in the process that put us on show cause. We’ve been saying ‘it wasn’t fair.’ And we’ve been told ‘its a totally fair process, you’re just not happy because you don’t like the result.’ Now we have an important authority verifying what we’ve been saying.”

Time will tell what will come of the DOE letter, if anything. But for now it seems that if the ACCJC being out of compliance with its own rules is a conspiracy theory, then the Department of Education is wearing the biggest tin-foil hat in the room, and is onto something significant.

Tales from the tracks

Erica Hanna
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83
Tales from the tracks

news@sfbg.com

BART’s trains will keep running, for now, after a San Francisco Superior Court judge ordered the 60-day cooling-off period that Gov. Jerry Brown was angling for last week to address BART’s labor contract impasse. The injunction is in effect until Oct. 10, blocking any strike or lockout until then.

A report by the Bay Area Council said that the four-day strike in early July cost the Bay Area $73 million a day. That estimate was also a conservative one, according to a report put together by a special investigative board convened by Brown to look into the brinkmanship between BART workers and management.

“All parties agree that the major issues of the negotiations remain unresolved, including wages, health benefits, pensions contributions, and workplace safety,” the Aug. 8 report said.

Aside from the nitty gritty of the contracts, the two parties can’t even agree on math. The report found that the “parties do not agree on the magnitude of the gap in their respective economic proposals,” and that they are between $56 and $62 million apart on their forecasts of district finances for the next three years.

Management’s biggest concerns are still capital investments. Last year, BART approved a contract for 410 new cars, at a cost of about $2.2 million per car. The union’s proposals leave little room for capital improvements, BART management said at the Aug. 8 investigatory hearing.

But the unions say that BART is financially healthy and can offer a decent contract to workers. Out of a budget of $1.5 billion, union officials say payroll for their members totals about $200 million.

The unions and management will now have two months to cool off. But will that help along their negotiations? SEIU Local 1021, which represents engineers and custodial workers, doesn’t seem to think so.

“We have bargained unsuccessfully with this employer from May 13 to June 30, 2013 with no true indication from the district that it intended to reach an agreement,” the unions wrote in a letter to the investigative board. “We have no reason to believe that if a 60 day cooling off period were created, we would not be standing then on the precipice of another work stoppage without an agreement.”

Meanwhile, to put a human face on a labor standoff that has provoked sometimes nasty reactions from the public, we ran a couple profiles of BART workers on the SFBG.com Politics blog last week. The response was so passionate and overwhelming, we decided to run them in the paper as well:

 

ROBERT BRIGHT

First we met Robert Earl Bright, a 47-year-old transit vehicle mechanic at the Hayward yards, where he’s been for three years. BART trains seem tame compared to the machines he used to work with, starting out as an Air Force mechanic working on cargo planes.

It’s that experience he draws from when he said BART’s policies are becoming increasingly dangerous.

Bright is tall but soft-spoken, and while we sat at a bench in a courtyard at Lake Merritt BART station, he talked about the shortcuts BART has taken lately, and how overtime and consolidation are bad practices for everyone involved.

There used to be specific workers called Power & Way controllers who looked out for workers on the train tracks and made sure they were safe, he said, but those responsibilities were consolidated into a separate train controller position. Since then, Bright saw the death of a colleague, a mechanic who switched from a graveyard shift to a day shift and was hit by an oncoming train.

Only after the death did BART take steps to ensure parts of the track where there was less clearance safe from trains were marked, he said.

“The problem is BART seems to wait until someone gets killed until they want to do something about it,” he said.

Bright is a new grandfather. He helps support his daughter and her two toddlers, and he supports his older brother who suffers from dementia. Bright has a home that his fiancée bought, but is “upside-down,” as he says, because of a predatory loan.

He’s one of the lucky ones though, as the military pays for his health care, and the negotiations don’t impact him as far as that goes. But he does worry about his pension, and thinks he may have to cut back on supporting his elderly brother and his grandchildren. Even with those cutbacks in his life, he’ll likely have to look for a part-time job as a car mechanic, he said.

While contemplating that future, his four-hour daily commute, and the new expectations BART asked of his crew to repair more cars in less time, he started to develop an ulcer.

“They’re short on people, and it’s cheaper for the managers to pay for overtime than to pay for another person,” he said. The stress pressed on him and one day at work he grew dizzy and collapsed. That’s when he started to be a little more Zen about what BART asked of him. But he still said it’s not right.

“Our shop is a mod [modification] shop, but we got tasked with doing preventive maintenance. Our shop isn’t set up for that,” he said. And that means workers who aren’t trained for that particular job are pushed to fix up cars when normally they’re doing an entirely different job. That can be dangerous, he said.

“We have to make sure that those trains not only run, we also have to make sure they’re safe,” Bright said. “Something could happen, like a panel popping off. It touches the third rail, it could catch on fire. If we could miss something… it could cause a derailment.”

As far as Bright goes, he said he’s seeing more people working overtime at the request of managers, working longer hours that could lead to unsafe conditions — not just for the mechanics, but for the people who ride BART every day.

 

PHYLLIS ALEXANDER

Phyllis Alexander has been with BART for 16 years in systems service, which she said basically means, “cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.”

“Wherever they need me, that’s what I do,” she said.

Alexander often starts her days cleaning the elevators and escalators at Powell Street Station, and if you’ve been reading the news lately, you know what that means.

She doesn’t mince words about it: “I clean the urine and the feces out of the elevators and make sure it’s clean and smelling good for the patrons.”

But Alexander doesn’t hold it against the homeless. When she first started at BART, she had little contact with them. But over the years, she’s made good friends out of some of the homeless at Powell and 16th Street stations, and the latter is where she sat and told her story.

“As the years passed, it got worse. People living in their cars on the streets, in their doorways. I’ve met a lot of wonderful homeless people, wonderful people,” she said. And as the years went by, it got harder for the cleaning crew, too. She’s one of two systems service folk who take care of Powell Street Station at any one time.

“Sometimes it can be tough, it can get hectic, but we get it done. It’s hecka huge, and there’s only two of us, but we have to do the best we can do.”

But she keeps with it for herself and her daughter.

Her daughter just finished medical school and is still living with her. Alexander makes about $52,000 a year, she said, and couldn’t figure out major cuts she’d make in her lifestyle to make room for paying more into her pension or health care.

“It would hurt me,” she said. She said that though people in the Bay Area demonize BART workers for wanting a raise, she feels it’s simply been too long since they’ve had one.

“I think I haven’t gotten a raise in two contracts. It’s been like seven or eight years,” she said.

Devoutly religious, ultimately she keeps faith that the workers will prevail in negotiations.

“(God) is going to bring this through,” she said. “This thing with management, it’s going to be all right.”

 

For the Record: Clearing up misinformation about BART workers

 

HEALTHCARE

BART workers pay only $92 a month into their health care. Right? Wrong. “That doesn’t tell the full story,” said Vincent Harrington, a lawyer representing the unions at the negotiating table. “These workers contributed 1.627 percent of their wages into a fund to cover not only the ongoing health care of active employees, but also the retirees.”

That brings the total to about $180 per person, he said, with a caveat. Some time ago, employer-provided health care was capped. “Additional (healthcare) costs beyond that cap would be on the workers and their families, not on BART,” he said.

 

PENSIONS

It’s true that BART workers don’t contribute to their pensions, but the entity responsible for that is BART management. In 1980, BART made the proposal to pay employee contributions to pensions in exchange for wage concessions from BART workers. The unions recently proposed to contribute 7 percent of their pension benefits, with wage increases of 6.5 percent to offset that. BART management said they’d agree, if the wage increase was lowered to 0.5 percent instead.

 

WAGES VERSUS COST

A database constructed by the San Jose Mercury News lists a BART employee’s full cost to the taxpayer — often at around $100,000. This is their “cost” to BART, not the wages they take home, a common mistake regularly made by angry online commenters. All employees everywhere, private or public sector, have a cost to their employer past their base salary.

According to Intuit.com, a web resource for small businesses, business owners should consider that each employee they hire will cost twice the amount of their wages. This is normal stuff, people. It’s wrong, and not factually significant, to demonize BART workers for costing more than their salaries.

 

OVERTIME

BART employees have also been villainized for working overtime. But these employees don’t necessarily want to work overtime at all, and often do it at the urging of managers who have slashed so many workers in the past decade that the only way the trains will run is if everyone puts in extra work. A worker at the Aug. 7 BART hearing said, “I go to work before my daughter wakes up, and I’m home from work when my daughter goes to sleep.”

Some mechanics we talked to said that working overtime can also lead to more injuries, and a higher possibility of mistakes that could cost riders their lives.

 

SAFETY

Since 2010, 1,099 BART customers reported being physically attacked, and so were 99 BART employees. Those station agents often work alone at night and just before dawn, the only staff in the entire station. They want extra staffing to help meet OSHA recommendations that employees work in pairs. They also want better worker’s compensation coverage. Saul Almanza, a BART representative from SEIU Local 1021 and a 17-year railroader, said “The area where [BART mechanic] Mr. [Robert] Rhodes was killed was very dark, and remains that way today. Look at the picture to the left, and that’s where Mr. Rhodes was standing as the southbound train proceeded through the interlock. It was dark and loud, and that’s where he was struck as he stood there with no place to go.”

 

BATHROOMS

One of the underreported asks at the bargaining table is unlocked bathrooms. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, many of the bathrooms at most BART’s stations have been locked. This prevents customers and workers alike from doing as nature intended. It’s a matter of respect and dignity to be able to do use a bathroom while at your workplace, said one BART worker, Jon Kozlosky, at the hearing. THE TRAINS DRIVE THEMSELVES One of the accusations we see on our comment board with every article is that since the trains drive themselves, the workers must have little expertise. But the drivers still carry out many functions of the trains. Besides, most BART workers toil behind the scenes: 920 of BART workers are drivers and station agents, but about 1,450 employees are in mechanical maintenance, clerical, and other jobs (like sanitation).

Lawsuit over injury from airborne fire hydrant tests Uber’s insurance practices

Erica Hanna
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103
Lawsuit over injury from airborne fire hydrant tests Uber’s insurance practices

Uber’s policy on insuring its drivers will soon be taken for a test drive, as the company that runs the mobile app-based ride requesting service and a driver were served with a court summons last week from a woman severely injured after a crash near a San Francisco intersection.

Those insurances policies were said to meet brand new regulatory requirements on rideshare services introduced by the California Public Utilities Commission on July 30, which was meant to solve the longtime regulatory battle between rideshare services and local governments.

The plaintiff in the suit, Claire Farhbach, was a bystander, not a customer, and that unique twist in the injury suit has experts from the taxi industry waiting to see if Uber will step up to the plate to pay for Farhbach’s injuries, or if Uber will leave driver Djamol Gafurov on the hook for the bill.

Fahrbach was walking up Divisadero street near Hayes at quarter of midnight March 12 when Gafurov’s black town car, operating as a private taxi, collided with another car on Divisadero while turning left. One of the cars then collided with a fire hydrant, and in the words of the civil suit, “this impact caused the fire hydrant to be violently sheared from its base and propelled through the air a number of feet northbound…when the fire hydrant struck (Farhbach) with a tremendous amount of force.”

The hydrant flew 81 feet from its original position, according to the police report.

The suit notes that Fahrbach sustained lacerations to her body, a fracture in her lower leg, and multiple herniated discs that “more likely than not will require surgical intervention in her future.”

Gafurov’s private taxi was operating as a “partner” of Uber, which is how the company defines its relationship to the network of drivers on its website. No private taxis or drivers are considered to be employees of Uber, as the company has repeatedly maintained. Uber provides software that lets passengers connect with drivers, like a digital dispatch, and the ridesharing service then takes a cut of the fare.

The image above is a modified police report from the fire hydrant incident, with numbers added: 1) site of the initial collision 2) where the vehicle hit the fire hydrant 3) where the hydrant hit Farhbach.

Yet that distinction has made their insurance liabilities nebulous, and local officials have taken notice. Officials at SFO last week started arresting rideshare operators in and around the airport, and the SFMTA, which regulates taxis, also considers them a problem.

The San Francisco Airport Commission and the SFMTA submitted concerns to the California Public Utilities Commission, charging that a “lack of adequate liability insurance, criminal background checks, driver training and regular vehicle inspections all decrease public safety, and although some [transportation network companies] represent that they do all of the above, the Airport Commission is asking for regulatory verification.” according to a CPUC report. “The SFMTA asserts that TNCs have a negative effect on public safety because of a lack of regulatory oversight.”

Cab drivers have long been regulated by the state, and these agencies contend that not only are rideshare companies like Uber dangerous, but the lack of insurance can be financially ruinous to pedestrians and drivers alike.

“Because it’s a pedestrian suing, that opens up a whole can of worms, and Uber may try to put the liability on the driver,” said Trevor Johnson, director of the San Francisco Cab Driver’s Association. A former cabbie himself, he’s been on both sides of that sort of litigation, as well as in legal actions with tech companies like Uber.

Johnson is not confident the driver will be covered by his own insurance plan, because in its current pseudo-taxi company state, many insurers consider you not quite a taxi but not a private driver, putting these tech-cabbies in an awkward limbo.

“He may be left with a big judgment, and his insurance may opt to not cover him because he’s with Uber,” he said.

This is backed up in our current issue of the Guardian, where Lyft driver Josh Wolf wrote from personal experience that it is difficult for Lyft drivers to obtain full insurance coverage for their vehicles.

A rideshare driver criticized Uber in a letter he wrote to the Guardian after reading that article. “I work for a limo company, I’m fully insured, the car is fully insured, but Uber takes absolutely no responsibility for its drivers,” the driver, who wanted to be identified as “Zark,” told us. He said he feared joining the ranks of self-employed cabbies, who often are under-insured. “[Uber] holds their customers in really high regard, but they don’t hold their drivers in any regard.”

Uber maintains that the drivers, and their actions, are not their responsibility.

In response to a query about the lawsuit, Uber spokesperson Andrew Noyes stated repeatedly that drivers are not employees of the rideshare company.

“Our legal team took a look at the files you sent. This is not an ‘Uber’ driver, they’re not employed by us. They’re employed by their licensed and insured limousine company,” he said. “The important thing is that theres no characterization of a driver as a driver at Uber.”

But Gafurov, the driver named in the accident, isn’t actually employed by a limo company.

Gafurov declined to speak to the Guardian, but after some digging, a disgruntled bystander, angry with Gafurov, found that he is self-employed and registered with the CPUC as the “Limo Car Service Corporation.”

Gafurov was driving with liability insurance, his CPUC registration shows — but he not did not have excess liability insurance, which would be needed to cover extraordinary damage caused by the flying fire hydrant. The gaping hole left by the hydrant spilled water out onto all the surrounding businesses, causing intense damage, and everyone affected is seeking compensation.

Fahrbach’s lawyer, Doug Atkinson, told us the cost of the accident will be enormous.

Notably, few independent drivers have excess liability insurance.

“A lot of carriers don’t have it, because it’s expensive,” Johnson told us. “This is a case for the excess insurance, as it stands right now with that much damage and that many people after him, unless Uber steps in and helps him save the day this driver is going to be in the hole for the next 20 years.” He added, “This guy’s life is over.”

Atkinson is hopeful that getting Uber to pay that insurance won’t be a hard sell. “I’m not looking for some protracted legal battle, I want to see a company that will do the right thing, who’s saying ‘I’m revolutionizing cab driving.’”

In order to persuade the CPUC of its viability during the regulatory proceeding, Uber told them it has the very excess liability insurance that Gafurov needs, in excess of $5 million, according to CPUC documentation from an April workshop.

But having that insurance in place is different from using it to cover damages when needed. According to Uber’s partner agreement with its drivers, “Uber and/or its licensors shall not be liable for any loss, damage or injury which may be incurred” by a driver.

Asked if Uber will help Farhbach pay her medical bill, Noyes responded, “You’re writing about a specific case and I don’t think I can say much more. A professionally licensed driver is protected by their company, it’s not really my issue to weigh in on.”

Meanwhile, Fahrbach isn’t doing very well at all, she wrote in an email. Her injuries forced her to leave her two jobs in San Francisco, one at a farmer’s market and another at a cafe, and she moved back in with her family in North Carolina to recover.

“My recovery has been a slow steady process laced with many ups and downs,” she said. “Having been immobile for the better part of three months has had an everlasting effect on my physical state. I will most likely be dealing with spinal problems for the rest of my life, but have tried to remain positive and grateful for the progress I have made.”

Fahrbach said she doesn’t have the money to cover her medical bills out-of-pocket, and this frightens her. “Frankly, if there is insufficient insurance to cover my injuries and losses, my financial future will be dismal.”

Last tango: Investigators sort through BART’s labor impasse

Erica Hanna
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123

Much of BART’s dirty laundry was aired at the first hearing on the negotiations in Oakland today, part of a seven-day investigation called by Gov. Jerry Brown after Sunday night’s talks between unions and management threatened the Bay Area with another strike.

The particulars of each side’s bargaining offers are normally hush-hush, but the hearing was a chance for the public to get a peek into what each side has been asking for. As the three-person panel on the governor’s fact-finding board sat at a long table facing the audience, management and unions sat on separate tables, much like that in a courtroom. 

Amid all the particulars of wages and economics, the unions levied  major allegations over safety concerns, saying that BART management hasn’t incorporated safety changes after the deaths of workers.

Saul Almanza, a BART representative from SEIU Local 1021 and a 17-year railroader, showed the board a set of photos of the places where BART workers had been killed on the job. 

“I’d like to start out with the picture with the part where Robert [Rhodes] was killed,” he said. “The area where Mr. Rhodes was killed was very dark, and remains that way today. Look at the picture to the left, and that’s where Mr. Rhodes was standing as the southbound train proceeded through the interlock. It was dark and loud, and that’s where he was struck as he stood there with no place to go.”

Almanza said that he brought up lighting improvements to his management at many levels, many times. When no improvements were made, that’s when the safety issues became a major point in bargaining, one sticking point that led to the four-day strike in early July. 

Paul Oversier, BART’s general manager of operations, made it a point to hammer home how pained the Bay Area was during the strikes, alleging that “people who depend on BART, who want to fill their prescriptions” may have been delayed, among others. 

He also touted some drastic numbers, saying the direct cost of the BART strike to the Bay Area was estimated at about $73 million per a weekday. 

“That doesn’t include empty tables at Bay Area restaurants, higher day care payments for working parents, or the  overall increase in personal stress throughout the region,” Oversier said. “None of these are counted in the economic model used for the BART strike.” 

But the union said that management did everything short of inviting them to strike, repeatedly used stalling tactics, making counter-offers that had changes of “point five percent” from their previous offers, and avoiding bargaining for as long as 33 hours at a time. 

Vincent Harrington has represented BART unions in contract negotiations since 1978, but he said this negotiation has had more hardball tactics than he’s seen in any negotiation. “This time around, we couldn’t even reach an agreement on ground rules,” he told the board. 

He also said that management used the media as a way to spread inaccurate information. He wanted to use the hearing as a chance to air the “facts versus myths.”

One commonly misreported figure is that BART workers pay only $92 per month into their healthcare, he said. “That doesn’t tell the full story. These workers contributed 1.627 percent of their wages into a fund to cover not only the ongoing health care of active employees, but also the retirees. There are 3,000 employees in the plans,” he said.

That brings the total to about $180 per person, he said, with a caveat. Some time ago, employer-provided healthcare was capped. “Additional costs beyond that cap would be on the workers and their families, not on BART,” he said.

Harrington also brought up a point of contention in negotiations that is familiar to regular BART riders: how bathrooms in the station are routinely locked and unavailable for use.
“We want BART to reopen bathrooms for patrons. We are not aware of a single transit station today that keeps the bathrooms locked. What does that mean for workers and our patrons? Where do they go? That means they relieve themselves in the stations,” he said. The bathrooms were locked since the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks at nearly every station. “We asked them to open them up. BART has said no.”

Management and the unions both presented their idealized BART systems, with management reiterating their need to invest in new trains and to control pension costs, and unions saying their workers deserve a living wage.

This will be the only public hearing day, and afterward the panel of Jacob Applesmith, Micki Callahan, and Robert L. Balgenort will put together a draft report for Brown, which is due Sunday. 

This could lead to a 60-day cooling off period where no strikes could take place, or Monday morning we could find ourselves with no BART trains and negotiations again at a standstill.

BART union negotiators said that they were willing to talk, and that they could even hammer out a deal with management by Sunday — if management is willing to bargain in good faith.

“It’s like a textbook on how to bargain but not actually be bargaining,” Harrington said. “It’s like a tango: you can’t do it by yourself very effectively.”

Any member of the public that wishes to send a comment about the BART negotiations may do so to communications@dir.ca.gov until 9am tomorrow [Thu/8]. The board said its report, once sent to the governor, would also be made public and likely available on the governor’s website.

 

 

 

From the mouths of BART workers; cleaning the dreaded escalators, skirting death

Erica Hanna
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213
From the mouths of BART workers; cleaning the dreaded escalators, skirting death

A reprieve in BART negotiations has given the Bay Area time to breathe before the next possible strike, but a lot of public concerns and animosity toward BART still remains. So the Guardian decided to take a look at BART workers themselves (we found them through their union) and ask, “How would your life change if the unions adopted BART management’s offers on safety, pensions, wages and health care?”

Note: The audio interviews are summarized in this post, but give them a listen to get a fuller picture of the impact of labor negotiations on worker’s lives.

First we met Robert Earl Bright, a 47-year-old transit vehicle mechanic at the Hayward yards, where he’s been for three years. BART trains seem tame compared to the machines he used to work with, as he started out as an Air Force mechanic working on cargo planes.

It’s that experience he draws from when he said BART’s policies are becoming increasingly dangerous.

Bright is tall but soft-spoken, and while we sat at a bench in a courtyard at Lake Merrit BART station, he talked about the shortcuts BART has taken lately, and how overtime and consolidation are bad practices for everyone involved.

There used to be specific workers called Power & Way controllers who looked out for workers on the train tracks and made sure they were safe, he said, but those responsibilities were consolidated into a separate train controller position. Since then, Bright saw the death of a colleague, a mechanic who switched from a graveyard shift to a day shift and was hit by an oncoming train.

Only after the death did BART take steps to ensure parts of the track where there was less clearance safe from trains were marked, he said.

“The problem is BART seems to wait until someone gets killed until they want to do something about it,” he said.

Bright is a new grandfather. He helps support his daughter and her two toddlers, and he supports his older brother who suffers from dementia. Bright has a home that his fiance bought, but is “upside-down,” as he says, because of a predatory loan.

He’s one of the lucky ones though, as the military pays for his health care, and the negotiations don’t impact him as far as that goes. But he does worry about his pension, and thinks he may have to cut back on supporting his elderly brother and his grandchildren. Even with those cutbacks in his life, he’ll likely have to look for a part time job as a car mechanic, he said.

While contemplating that future, his four-hour daily commute, and the new expectations BART asked of his crew to repair more cars in less time, he started to develop an ulcer.

“They’re short on people, and it’s cheaper for the managers to pay for overtime than to pay for another person,” he said. The stress pressed on him and one day at work he grew dizzy and collapsed, and that’s when he started to be a little more zen about what BART asked of him. But he still said it’s not right.

“Our shop is a mod [modification] shop, but we got tasked with doing preventive maintenance. Our shop isn’t set up for that,” he said. And that means workers who aren’t trained for that particular job are pushed to fix up cars when normally they’re doing an entirely different job. That can be dangerous, he said.

“We have to make sure that those trains not only run, we also have to make sure they’re safe,” Bright said. “Something could happen, like a panel popping off. It touches the third rail, it could catch on fire. If we could miss something… it could cause a derailment.”

As far as Bright goes, he said he’s seeing more people working over time at the request of managers, working longer hours that could lead to unsafe conditions — not just for the mechanics, but for the people who ride BART every day.


Phyllis Alexander, a BART systems service worker, cleans up in the Mission. Photo courtesy of Mark Mosher, SEIU 1021

Phyllis Alexander

Phyllis Alexander has been with BART for 16 years in systems service, which she said basically means, “cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.”

“Wherever they need me, that’s what I do,” she said.

Alexander often starts her days cleaning the elevators and escalators at Powell Street Station, and if you’ve been reading the news lately, you know what that means.

She doesn’t mince words about it: “I clean the urine and the feces out of the elevators and make sure it’s clean and smelling good for the patrons.”

But Alexander doesn’t hold it against the homeless. When she first started at BART, she had little contact with them. But over the years, she’s made good friends out of some of the homeless at Powell and 16th St. stations, and the latter is where she sat and told her story.

“As the years passed it got worse. People living in their cars on the streets, in their doorways. I’ve met a lot of wonderful homeless people, wonderful people,” she said. And as the years went by, it got harder for the cleaning crew, too. She’s one of two systems service folk who take care of Powell Street Station at any one time.

“Sometimes it can be tough, it can get hectic, but we get it done. It’s hecka huge, and there’s only two of us, but we have to do the best we can do.”

But she keeps with it for herself and her daughter.

Her daughter just finished medical school and is still living with her. Alexander makes about $52,000 a year, she said, and couldn’t figure out major cuts she’d make in her lifestyle to make room for paying more into her pension or health care.

“It would hurt me,” she said. She said that though people in the Bay Area demonize BART workers for wanting a raise, she feels it’s simply been too long since they’ve had one.

“I think I haven’t gotten a raise in two contracts. Its been like seven or eight years,” she said.

Devoutly religious, ultimately she keeps faith that the workers will prevail in negotiations.

“(God) is going to bring this through … this thing with management, it’s going to be all right,” she said.

Who killed City College?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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42
Who killed City College?

news@sfbg.com

The day City College of San Francisco heard it would close was the same day, July 3, that 19-year-old Dennis Garcia signed up for his fall classes.

With a manila folder tucked under his arm, he turned the corner away from the registration counter and strode by a wall festooned with black and white sketches of every City College chancellor since 1935, including a portrait of bespectacled founder Archibald Cloud. In a meeting room on the other side of that wall, the college’s current administrators were receiving the verdict from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.

It was their worst fears of the past year realized: City College’s accreditation was being revoked. Accreditation is necessary for the college to receive state funding, for students to get federal loans, and for the degree to be worth more than the paper it’s printed on.

Unbeknownst to Garcia, he walked out of the building just as the college received its death sentence, which is scheduled to be carried out next July unless appeals now underway offer a reprieve. In the interim, CCSF will essentially be a ward of the state, stripped of the local control it has enjoyed since Cloud’s days.

Just a few blocks down Ocean Avenue is the nerve center of City College’s teachers union. Housed in a flat above a Laundromat, the scent of freshly washed clothes wafted up the staircase to an office that instantly became a flurry of ringing phones and rushed voices.

Only an hour later, 10 or so union volunteers were calling their members, contacting nearly 1,600 City College faculty whose responses ranged from sad to furious. The volunteers read them bulleted factoids about accreditation and a call to join an upcoming protest march.

But the woes of City College reach deeper than a three line script could ever cover, and can be traced back to the oval office itself, leading to a really odd question: Did President Obama kill City College?

 

 

PRESSURE FROM THE TOP

When the president trumpeted education in his 2012 State of the Union speech, he sounded an understandable sentiment. “States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets,” Obama told the nation. “And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down.”

But the specifics of how to cut costs were outlined by years of policymaking and a State of the Union supplement sheet given to the press.

The president’s statement said that they will determine which colleges receive aid, “either by incorporating measures of value and affordability into the existing accreditation system; or by establishing a new, alternative system of accreditation that would provide pathways for higher education models and colleges to receive federal student aid based on performance and results.”

The emphasis is ours, but the translation is very simple: College accreditation agencies can either enforce the administration’s numbers-based plan or be replaced. The president’s college reform is widely known and hotly debated in education circles. Commonly known as the “completion agenda,” with an emphasis on measurable outcomes in job placement, it had its start under President George W. Bush, but Obama carried the torch.

The idea is that colleges divest from community-based programs not directly related to job creation or university degrees, and use a data measurement approach to ensure two-year schools transfer and graduate students in greater numbers. “Community colleges” would quickly become “junior colleges,” accelerating a slow transition that began many years ago.

But its critics say completion numbers are screwy: They discount students who are at affordable community colleges just to learn a single skill and students who switch schools, administrator Sanford Shugart of Valencia College in Florida wrote in an essay titled “Moving the Needle on College Completion Thoughtfully.”

Funding decisions made from completion numbers affect millions of students nationwide — and CCSF has now become the biggest laboratory rat in this experiment in finding new ways to feed the modern economy.

“I think there was a general consensus that the country is in a position that, coming out of the recession, we have diminished resources,” Paul Feist, spokesperson for the California Community College Chancellor’s Office, told us. “Completion is important to the nation — if you talk to economic forecasters, there’s a huge demand for educated workers. Completion is not a bad thing.”

Like dominoes, the federal agenda and Obama’s controversial Secretary of Education Arne Duncan tipped the Department of Education, followed by the ACCJC, and now City College — an activist school in an activist city and an institution that openly defied the new austerity regime.

 

WINNING THE BATTLE

In the ACCJC’s Summer 2006 newsletter, Brice Harris — then an accreditation commissioner, now chancellor of the state community college system — described the conflict that arose when colleges rallied against completion measurements established by the federal government.

“In the current climate of increased accountability, our regional accrediting associations find that tight spot to be more like a vice,” Harris wrote.

Many of the 14 demands the ACCJC made of City College trace back to the early days of Obama’s administration, when local trustees resisted slashing the curriculum during the Great Recession.

“There’s a logic to saying ‘We don’t want to put students on the street in the middle of a recession,'” said Karen Saginor, former City College academic senate president. “If you throw out the students, you can’t put them in the closet for two years and bring them back when you have the money.”

And they have a lot of students — more than 85,000. Like all community colleges in California, the price of entry is cheap, at $46 a unit and all welcome to attend. But since 2008, the system was hammered with budget cuts of more than $809 million, or 12 percent of its budget.

So programs were cut, including those for seniors, ex-inmates re-entering society, or young people enrolling to learn Photoshop or some other skill without committing to a four-year degree.

“As the recession hit, the Legislature instructed the community college system [to] prioritize basic skills, career technical, and transfer,” Feist said. “That’s to a large extent what we did. That was the reshaping of the mission of that whole system.”

It’s easy to cast the completion agenda as a shadowy villain in a grand dilemma, but as Feist or anyone on the federal level would note, people were already being pushed out of the system, to the tune of more than 500,000 students since the 2008-09 academic year due to the budget crisis. Course offerings have been slashed by 24 percent, according to the state chancellor’s office.

But City College would only go so far. Then-Chancellor Don Q. Griffin raised the battle cry against austerity and the completion agenda at an October 2011 board meeting, his baritone voice sounding one of his fullest furies.

“It was obvious to me when I heard Bush … and then Obama talking about the value of community colleges … they’re going to push out poor people, people of color, people who cannot afford to go anywhere else except the community college,” he said.

But when it came to paying for that pushback, things got tricky.

“No more of this bullshit, that we turn the other way and say it’s fine. We’re going to concentrate the money on the students,” Griffin said at a December 2011 board meeting. “You guys are talking about cutting classes, we don’t believe in that. Cut the other stuff first, cut it until it hurts, and then talk about cutting classes.”

So he slashed his own salary and lost staff through attrition and other means. The college had more than 70 administrators before 2008, and it now has fewer than 40.

“Since the recession in 2009, we’ve been seen as the rebels,” said Jeffrey Fang, a former student trustee on City College’s board. “When most of the colleges went and made cuts in light of the recession, we decided to find ways to keep everything open while doing what we could to eliminate spending.”

But those successes in saving classes put City College on a collision course with its accreditor.

 

LOSING THE WAR

Seven years ago, the ACCJC found six deficiencies that it asked City College to fix, finding it had too many campuses serving too many students, fiscal troubles, and hadn’t enforced measurement standards. Last year, it faulted City College for resisting those changes and tacked on eight additional demands, threatening to revoke its accreditation.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an official who worked closely with ACCJC as a member of one of the visiting accreditation teams told us there was pressure to crack down on all the Western colleges.

“The message they’re hearing from (ACCJC President) Barbara Beno is that Washington is demanding, ‘Why are you not being more strict with institutions with deficiencies that have lasted more than two years [and taking action] to revoke their accreditation?'” the source said.

This official said this may soon ripple to other accreditation agencies. “What’s anomalous about California is we’re getting to where everyone will be in a few years.”

The ACCJC’s next evaluation is this December, where it will be reviewed by the Department of Education. It wants to be ready, says Paul Fain, a reporter for Inside Higher Ed, a national trade publication.

“Washington writ large … is pushing very hard on accreditors to drive a harder line,” Fain told us. “There’s a criticism out there that accreditation is weak and toothless.”

The U.S. Department of Education declined to comment on the issue, saying only that it will formally respond to all officially filed complaints about ACCJC.

But the numbers speak volumes. As an ACCJC newsletter first described federal pressure back in 2006, seven community colleges in California were on probation or warning by the ACCJC. By 2012 that number leapt to 28.

But the California Federation of Teachers is fighting back, and recently filed a 280-page complaint about the ACCJC with the Department of Education.

The allegations were many: Business conflict of interest from a commission member, failure to adhere to its own policies and bylaws, and even the commission President Beno’s husband having served on City College’s visiting team, which the unions said is a clear conflict of interest.

Some people think it’s a waste of time, that City College has already lost.

“That process of fighting accreditation won’t succeed, it just forestalls the problem,” said Bill McGinnis, a trustee on Butte College’s board for over 20 years. He’s also served on many ACCJC visiting teams.

But the unions are making some headway. The Department of Education wrote a letter to the ACCJC telling them to respond in full to the complaints by July 8, as this article goes to press. The accreditor will soon be the one evaluated.

 

WHAT’S NEXT?

In the meantime, City College has exactly one year to reverse its fortunes: The loss of accreditation doesn’t actually kick in until July, 2014. A special trustee appointed by the state will be granted all the powers of the locally elected City College Board of Trustees to get with the federal program. Without voting power, the elected body is effectively castrated.

No one knows what that will mean for the college board, not even Mayor Ed Lee, who issued a statement supporting the state takeover and criticizing local trustees for not cutting enough. “The ACCJC is fundamentally hostile to elected boards and they’ve made that clear,” City College Trustee Rafael Mandelman told us. “The Board of Trustees should and may look at all possible legal options around this.”

Although officials say classes will proceed as normal for the next year, some aren’t waiting around to see if City College will survive.

At its last board meeting, the CCSF Board of Trustees grappled with how to address dwindling enrollment. As news of its accreditation troubles spread, City College has been under-enrolled by thousands of students, exacerbating its problems. Since the state funds colleges based on numbers of students, City College’s funding is plummeting by the millions.

A frightening statistic: When Compton College lost its accreditation in 2005 and was subsequently absorbed by a neighboring district, it lost half its student population, according to state records.

Even the faculty is having a hard time hanging on, said Alisa Messer, the college’s faculty union president.

“People are looking for jobs elsewhere already. Despite everyone’s dedication to see the college through, it has tried everyone and stretched them to the limit,” she told us.

The college has two hopes — that the CFT wins its lawsuit and can reverse the ACCJC decision, or that the new special trustee can somehow turn the college around by next July. But either way, something will be lost. “City College is definitely changing,” Saginor said. “What it will change into, and if those changes will be permanent, that I don’t know.”

City College loses accreditation, throwing its future into doubt

Sasha Cuttler
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79

City College of San Francisco will lose its accreditation, it was announced today, and the venerable local college may not survive. With its impending death, the future of thousands of San Franciscans seeking education and a better life are in limbo.

The loss of accreditation becomes effective in one year, and the decision is being appealed, during which time local control is being transferred to a state trustee. The California Community College Chancellor’s Office has not yet named the trustee that it will appoint, and officials say the trustee will be given full authority to make decisions in the place of the current Board of Trustees.

“I think state intervention is going to be necessary,” said Mayor Ed Lee told reporters this afternoon.

“It’s imperative City College stay open for business and education the 85,000 students it serves” Lee said in a conference call with reporters. “I’m concerned about the devastating impact City College’s termination would have on our great city.”

The long-awaited decision was expected sometime around this long holiday weekend, and officials knew losing the accreditation was a possibility, but most said privately that they didn’t think the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges would actually pull the trigger. So right now, everyone is still reeling from the news.

“It’s too soon to say who that special trustee will be at that point,” State Community College Chancellor Brice Harris said. 

Locally elected Trustee Rafael Mandelman said that the locally elected board will continue operating until July of 2014, when the termination of the accreditation becomes effective, but it’s unclear what authority it will now have. 

“It’s disappointing, it’s outrageous, I don’t think it’s called for. I don’t think it’s the right outcome. I don’t think the state is going to do a better job running the school than a local board could,” he told us.

“We believe that the best way to bring the college from certain closure is to put the college under trusteeship of certain powers,” Harris said, adding that the search for a new chancellor for CCSF will now be accelerated. The current chancellor is an interim chancellor, the second one in a year after chancellor Don Griffin left the school due to an illness.

“We are disappointed in the Commission’s decision. We will be filing a request for review and will do everything in our power to have this decision reversed,” Chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman said in a prepared statement. “What is of utmost importance at this time is that City College remains open, and instruction and services will continue. We want to assure our students and their families that we will serve them and continue to provide the high quality education that they expect from City College. We will continue to register new and returning students for the Fall semester and look forward to their arrival on campus in August.”

City College was put on sanction by the commission back in July of 2012 after allegedly failing to fix issues identified by the commission six years prior. Since then, the college has been in panic mode. 

The threat of closure brought drastic changes at whip lash speed over the past few months: two campuses shuttered, over 40 counselors and support staff were laid off, faculty took a 7 percent pay cut and student enrollment has plummeted.

Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance Peter Goldstein put the college’s finances this way, “This has been a nightmare of a fiscal year.”

But there were positive improvements as well, said Alisa Messer, an English teacher and faculty union president of City College’s local AFT 2121. 

“Faculty have banded together and worked hard to address the requirements around student learning outcomes,” Messer said. SLOs, as they’re commonly known, measure student learning over the course of a class and in a student’s college career. 

“The accrediting commission felt it wasn’t integrated throughout the college, but they would be hard pressed to say it isn’t now,” she said.

Despite City College’s improvements the California Federation of Teachers is set on fighting the accreditation commission’s decision. They filed a massive 280-plus page complaint to the U.S. Department of Education alleging that the accreditation commission violated many of its own rules in evaluating CCSF.

 

The commission responded by locking out over 30 faculty and concerned citizens from its most recent public meeting, even barring a reporter from the SF Chronicle from entering.  

Now the commission has asked visiting accreditation teams, who evaluate colleges on site, to shred their documentation to make such complaints harder to research, which was originally reported on by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The work you do here is a position of trust, the documents you receive are given to you in that light.” said a faculty member who had served on prior accreditation teams, but did not wish to be named because they are not approved to speak on behalf of the accreditation commission. “When you’re done fulfilling your responsibility its good policy to dispose of them, and its the commission’s expectation.”

Some of the documents are proprietary information at for-profit colleges, such as Heald. It makes sense to protect that private information. The visiting team has “a look behind the curtain,” the faculty member said. 

But Messer isn’t buying it. “We’ve asked they be more transparent, they’ve done the opposite of that,” Messer said.

On the college’s Ocean campus, just outside the Chancellor’s office in a retro brown speckled hallway, Dennis Garcia walked by with his City College registration info in hand.

He’s ready for his next semester, and unlike the thousands of students that didn’t enroll in City College this year, he forged ahead.  

“I decided to come because I’m not scared or nervous about the school going down,” he said.

Garcia is an 18-year-old criminal justice major and SF native who dreams of transferring to San Francisco or San Jose State Universities. He wants to be a star soccer player while in school.

But why did he stay when so many others fled? 

“Why City College? It’s home,” he said. “People say, coming here is not successful, but I mean, sometimes you don’t have money and you’re not an A or B student, but you get your math and English done and you go from there. College is college.”

Now, whether City College remains a college this time next year is still an open question.

 

City College students a step closer to earning SF minimum wage

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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26
City College students a step closer to earning SF minimum wage

Student workers at City College may soon be paid San Francisco’s minimum wage of $10.55 an hour, thanks to a motion made by Student Trustee Shanell Williams at last night’s college board meeting.

It was Williams’ first night on the job, and she drew cheers from students and faculty when she voiced support for students’ fair pay. 

“The (federal) loans for students are set to double in days,” Trustee Chris Jackson told the board and more than 75 meeting attendees gathered at the college’s Ocean Campus. “It’s hard working nine dollars an hour and maintaining residency in San Francisco.”

Francisco employs student workers for a myriad of positions, from clerical workers to advertising agents on the school newspaper. Students are required to be enrolled in at least six credit units in order to enter the college’s work-study program, and must also file an application for federal aid. Notably, San Francisco’s minimum wage is the highest in the country – but according to a recent article in the San Francisco Public Press, it is not widely enforced.

As a state agency housed in state facilities, City College is exempt from the city’s minimum wage ordinance, according to the city’s Office of Standards and Labor Enforcement. The institution is only required to pay its employees the state minimum wage of $8 an hour, though it pays them $9 an hour. 

Williams’ motion came as the college’s Chief Financial Officer, Peter Goldstein, outlined the potential budget future of the school.

“This has been a nightmare of a fiscal year. We’re holding onto any balance that we could to end it on a positive side,” he said. 

Goldstein couldn’t provide an exact number on how much a minimum wage increase for student workers would cost the school, but told the Bay Guardian it could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars out of City College’s nearly $200 million budget. At the meeting, Williams was asked where she would draw the money for the wage increase. 

“I would like to amend that our CFO Peter Goldstein analyze the budget, look at consulting, and move that funding to raise student wages,” she said. 

When she met resistance for suggesting that funding be diverted from consulting, and the motion was nearly killed.

Trustee Rafael Mandelman voiced opposition to pulling funding from college consultants, which include public relations and technology professionals. 

“I am relatively supportive of the idea of paying our student workers the city minimum wage,” he said. “But I am not going to vote for that amendment tonight because I want to know how much that will cost. I’m nervous about making a bunch of changes on the spot.”

Student Lalo Gonzalez then addressed the board in public comment, taking aim directly at Mandelman. “Back in November, I passed out signs saying, ‘vote for Mandelman, he’ll save City College,’ but you just said you wouldn’t vote on raising student minimum wages,” she said. “Who are you trying to save?”

Ultimately, Goldstein was directed to determine the total cost of raising the student minimum wage, and to identify potential places where funding could be diverted from the budget to fund the wage increase. The board will take up the matter again at its next meeting in July. 

The college’s newspaper, The Guardsman, reported on the school’s lack of adherence to the San Francisco minimum wage in 2012. In an article by student reporter Lance Kramer, 21-year-old student Kirk Ireland said he depended on his job as a docent for City College’s Diego Rivera Theater, which houses Diego’s historic painting “Pan-American Unity.” Ireland told Kramer: “I don’t have to go home and I don’t have to commute to a job later at night, so it actually helps a lot. It’s part of my success that I attribute to working on campus.”

City College overseers bar most speakers from meeting

Zelda Bronstein
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22
City College overseers bar most speakers from meeting

The Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges has the power to close City College of San Francisco, and students and faculty in line at the San Francisco Airport Marriott June 7 were there to hear about the fate of their school.

But at the only public meeting available to meet with City College’s accreditors in more than seven months, some 30 people were barred from entry.

The doors were were shut, police said, because there were only about 20 seats available.

Even the San Francisco Chronicle’s higher education reporter, Nanette Asimov, was left outside, haggling with officers to get into the meeting — and she called ahead to reserve a seat.

Lalo Gonzalez, a City College student who was recently elected to the Associated Students Senate, was dismayed at not being able to meet with the accreditation agency. “I would’ve assumed they would have reached out to students,” he said.

But they didn’t.

The commission made its decision June 6 on whether City College would keep its accreditation — without which the school would lose state funding and close. But that decision won’t be revealed until early July.
The accreditors put the school sanction for a number of reasons, mostly fiscal but also relating to measuring student achievement. The college has 85,000 students and nearly 2,600 faculty.

The meeting was held at the same Marriott used many times in the past for meetings, the commissioners said. But unlike normal meetings, on June 7 there were four police officers, two from Burlingame PD and two from City College, who patrolled more than 60 feet of metal barriers erected around the corner.

Part of that may have been reaction to the 30 demonstrators from the Save CCSF coalition (www.saveccsf.org) that protested outside the accreditor’s closed meeting Wednesday.

“I was shocked that we couldn’t get in,” student Sharon Shatterly said.

No bags, recording devices, or cameras were allowed in the meeting. As a private entity, the accreditation commission does not fall under California open access laws like the Brown Act.
Inside, 24 commissioners from the agency were seated, dealing with the day-to-day business of managing matters of California’s 112 community colleges, seemingly unconcerned about the dozens who waited outside wishing to speak. In fact, only two public speakers were allowed to address the accreditors.

One was Teeka James, a San Mateo community college teacher speaking on behalf of the California Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers. She read aloud a litany of complaints about the accreditors, alleging that the teams sent to evaluate community colleges didn’t have enough faculty members, that the policies of the accreditors weren’t values “widely accepted” by educators or other accrediting bodies, and that there was a lack of transparency in how they operate.

She especially bemoaned the agency’s conflict of interest —  the commission president is Barbara Beno, and her husband served on the team that visited and evaluated City College a year ago, which resulted in the severe sanction the school is under today.

The president and the reviewing agents are supposed to be independent entities.

“To serve the students and people of California properly, ACCJC has to change or be delisted by the Department of Education,” James said. “The time is now.”

She was basically summarizing an official complaint about the accreditation agency sent to the Department of Education last month. It’s 280 pages long, and the allegations are serious.

After her presentation, the members of the commission started to grill her.

“What qualifications do you have? What is the source of your evidence?” said Steven Kinsella, who was named in the official complaint as someone whose ties to business constituted a conflict of interest to his role as a commissioner on the ACCJC. He is a “public member” of the agency.

The questions kept coming – and some were about James herself.

“I don’t think they took her very seriously,” said Fred Teti, president of the City College Academic Senate.

James also argued that the accreditors needed to be more transparent about their process, which was exemplified by the dozens of people who weren’t let into the meeting. Beno disagreed.

“We’re a private institution,” she said. “You can imagine a college president comes in and they discuss matters that could be embarrassing or challenging. That can’t occur in public.”
 
Outside, the students who had come to talk to the commission that may potentially close their school sat beside each other in the sun, watching the blue of the bay from the hotel’s patio.

And what would Gonzalez and his fellow students have said to the panel if they had gotten in?

“I would’ve asked about if they knew how this was affecting my people, people of color. I would’ve asked about EOPS,” he said, which is the second chance program at City College for those coming out of prison. “They’ve cut over 30 counselors, they’re dismantling the school in the name of accreditation.”

Gonzalez and all of San Francisco will have to wait until the beginning of July to find out what will happen to City College.

CCSF board approves report to accreditors amid heavy criticism

Sasha Cuttler
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164
CCSF board approves report to accreditors amid heavy criticism

Windsong, a 21-year-old City College student, held a sign that read “I love CCSF” while standing along Ocean Avenue last evening, as cars rolled by honking their support for the embattled school.

“I love learning while not being bound by the four-year school structure,” she said. She’s an artist in residence at a local elementary school, and was protesting to make sure City College of San Francisco could give her students the same opportunities she had.

“This place is in my heart,” she said. And she wasn’t alone.

Nearly 200 protesters lined the building outside of City College’s board of trustees meeting last night as the CCSF Board of Trustees approved the school’s “Show Cause” report, which is a 220-page document detailing what the college has done to meet its accreditation requirements — accreditation is required for a college degree to have worth, and for a school to receive state funding.

In short, it’s a document arguing what the college has done to improve since it was hit with sanctions last October, and why it should stay open and accredited. The report is due to the accreditation commission on March 15.

The Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges hit City College with a “show cause” sanction, citing a lack of progress in six problem areas the school was supposed to address since its last accreditation review six years before. When the accrediting commission came back to check on the school, it concluded City College had yet to address key areas, including measuring Student Learning Outcomes, and adequately funding their reserve, a “rainy day fund” the college leans on in hard times.

City College said that it has now met the challenge of those key problem areas. “We were deferring maintenance, and deferring (upgrading) technology,” said board president John Rizzo. “We’re required to spend money, and this gives us a plan going forward.”

But the shouting protesters outside the meeting and the angry students inside disagreed with some points of the plan. Proposition A was a parcel tax measure approved by voters in November that would raise somewhere between $14-16 million City College annually, which the board wanted to use to beef up the college’s reserve fund, one of the key areas where they were knocked by the accrediting commission.

California Federation of Teachers president Joshua Pechthalt implored the board to use Prop A funds for current teachers. “The men and women who work in this college spent many hours taking money out of their pockets to pass Prop A,” Pechthalt said in public comment to the board. The audience of about a hundred or so faculty and students cheered. “I would ask you to work closely with faculty and staff, that you work collaboratively with them.”

Pechthalt was there at the behest of Alisa Messer, the president of City College’s American Federation of Teachers Local 2121. Teachers at City College have had wage freezes for years, and most recently had an 8.8 percent wage reduction just this past month.

Part-time teachers were hit too, as nearly 40 of them were “not rehired” for the current semester, as well as 18 counselors and 30 members of the college’s staff..

Student Martin Madrigal, a 29-year-old mathematics major at CCSF, said he also supported using the Prop A funding to prevent layoffs and wage reductions.

“I missed class to come to this fight,” Madrigal said to the board. “But if I didn’t come here there wouldn’t be a class to miss.”

One by one, faculty and students implored the board to use Prop A funds to buffer the college’s wage reductions and layoffs. At one point, student Eric Blanc, a member of the protest group Save CCSF, came to the podium to speak in public comment and was cut off by the board. Ten or so other students and faculty had yet to speak, and were told there was no longer time.

Blanc then demanded of the board his time to speak. The campus police chief, Andre Barnes, and an officer approached Blanc and tried to remove him from the room. The tension in the room mounted as the audience started chanting “let him speak, let him speak!”

Trustee Rafael Mandelman diffused the situation, asking for silence and calmly explaining that the board needed time to conduct its business. Tensions rose again though as the topic of the college’s reserve fund came up — the reserve is now at $4 million, but the school is planning to boost it to $13 million by 2014, and $18 million by 2019.

It’s a needed safety net, the trustees argued, for a school with a budget hovering at more than $200 million a year and an economy that’s in the tank.

“Tomorrow the sequestration will begin, and it will impact California spending and our communities,” Trustee Steve Ngo said. “This [money] is going to faculty and staff, but in the future. Faculty and staff would not have to take cuts in wages, if we had funded the reserve.”

Ultimately, the board voted to approve its long term reserve fund plan, using Prop A funds to help buffer the reserve for the future. Blanc told the trustees that they had denied themselves other options, like suing the accreditation commission, or asking for emergency funding from City Hall.

“I think behind the rhetoric of this are thousands of people being shut out,” he said.

Vice Chancellor Peter Goldstein, who handles college finance, said that some of the claims of the protesters were inaccurate.

“I keep hearing people talking about cutting classes,but that’s not our plan for [fiscal year] 13-14,” he said. “In fact, this college is putting together a budget for next year that will have more classes than this year.”

The college may not be cutting classes, but it is asking everyone to do more with less. Teachers to teach with less salary, students to fit into larger classrooms, and for classes soon to fit into fewer campuses.

Whether those are improvements or dire straits depends on who you ask.

Video by Joe Fitzgerald:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/pMXeECCvVTs

http://www.youtube.com/embed/L5To6k2uU60

 

Save CCSF plans to march to City Hall to demand aid to CCSF and to protest austerity cuts at the college on March 14. For more information visit http://www.saveccsf.org/.

Click here to read City College’s 220 page “Show Cause” report: http://www.ccsf.edu/ACC/Preliminary_Final_Draft_Show_Cause_Report_Feb_26.doc.

City College forum questions new reforms as deadline looms

Sasha Cuttler
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More than 300 of City College of San Francisco’s students and faculty piled into a meeting hall at the school’s Mission campus last night, Feb.7, all waiting to hear the answer to one question: What can we do to save City College?

CCSF failed to meet a list of six requirements to improve the school that the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges gave it to complete in 2006, notably in measuring student learning outcomes and in managing its finances. Failing to meet those deadlines, the ACCJC told City College last June that it had until March 15, 2013 to fix their school, or it would face losing its accreditation — which means the college would lose state funding, and the degrees it offered from that point on would be almost worthless.

Concerned for the future of their college, a coalition of students, faculty and community members started “Save CCSF,” the group that organized the teach-in at Mission campus.

Students occupied every chair, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the back of the hall. The meeting was about education, the first speaker announced, meant to inform students about the crisis. How did CCSF come under threat of closure? Who is the accreditation body that posed the threat? The answers were complicated, and filled with accusations against the ACCJC, and the school’s own Board of Trustees.

“We do accept there are deficiencies at City College,” student Inder Grewal, 20, said to the crowd. “But the administration is making change at a pace that is hurting faculty and students at our school.”

Notable speakers came out to show their support for the diverse students at City College. Wisconsin State Senator Spencer Coggs, one of the “Wisconsin 14” who fled the state to deny Governor Scott Walker quorum in the senate over his union-busting legislation, spoke in his support of City College’s labor force.

“We believe in justice for workers rights, correct?” he said to the crowd, to cheers. “You in California supported us in Wisconsin, we in Wisconsin support you in California.”

State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who represents San Francisco, sent a representative to show his support for the Save CCSF coalition. “We have been working on this issue,” Kimberly Alvarenga, Ammiano’s district director, said to the coalition supporters. “Last week we had a meeting with Assemblymember Ting, labor, and a rep from the [California Community College] state chancellor’s office to get a conversation started. We’re in solidarity with you.”

Just today, Ting held a press conference to support City College. Notably, CCSF faculty union leader Alisa Messer, staff union head Athena Steff, and SF Labor Council head Tim Paulson spoke as well, perhaps signaling Ting’s support of labor at the college.

At the press conference, college spokesperson Larry Kamer acknowledged the disagreements within the college, and offered to find middle ground.

“There’s a lot we don’t agree on,” he said. “But one thing we do agree on is we want City College to remain accredited, we want people to recognize the work that’s been done, we want them to appreciate what we still have to do. But the headline today is we want people to enroll.”

Above, video of the press conference courtesy of The Guardsman, the newspaper of City College of San Francisco

The makeup of the crowd of currently enrolled students at the coalition meeting last night was a good indicator of exactly who stands to lose in City College’s shakeup. Easily half the room was filled with Latino students of every age and stripe, and many of them answered that they were English as Second Language students worried about their future.

“I was a dishwasher, a janitor, everything,” said a man who wanted to be identified only as Jose because he is an undocumented student. Jose emigrated from El Salvador 10 years ago, and decided to take ESL classes at City College so he could get a new lease on life. He hasn’t decided on his major yet, maybe natural sciences, creative writing, or social science. The world is open to him, he said, because of his ESL classes.

“If I hadn’t taken classes at City College, I couldn’t be talking to you now.”

He and other students were there for answers, and the answers they got were alarming.

Changes for the worse

The Save CCSF coalition urged the hundreds of students and faculty in attendance to bring anyone they could to rally at City Hall on March 14 — the day before City College is set to deliver its “show cause report” to the ACCJC. The report is a detailed report of the progress the college has made to address the ACCJC’s requirements for change. You can read the draft here.

In order to meet the ACCJC’s requirements, the board of trustees and administration have been making stark changes to the college, ones that the people in the meeting that night said were harming students.

“Who’s been to the Bayview district?” Shanell Williams, associated students president, asked the crowd. Easily 30 hands went up. “There was a van students were using to get to their campus without getting shot, that the college cut out of the budget. It’s about access.”

The college is cutting funds wherever it can, and the private bus that shuttled students across gang lines in the Bayview was only the first of many changes. The Save CCSF coalition also told the crowd that they were fighting to restore the jobs of the over 30 classified staff and 50 faculty that weren’t rehired for this school year — essentially let go.

“Use the Proposition A funds as promised,” Tarik Farrar, chair of African American studies said. He was referring to the language in Prop. A that went before San Francisco voters last November saying the $14 million parcel tax would be used to stop faculty layoffs at City College. “It’s explicit, not vague. The interim chancellor and special trustee does not have the right to use the money as they choose.”

Protecting labor isn’t strictly about protecting teachers because ultimately, the loss of faculty shrinks class offerings and class sizes.

Farrar was especially concerned that the belt tightening at the school would shrink the population it sets out to serve, something the college has already put into writing, by rewriting its mission statement.

“If you turn CCSF into a school of 20,000 students it will not be accessible,” he said. “The students that will be hurt disproportionately by this school will be the students I teach, people who look like this room, mostly.”

It is important to note that City College is still open, and is still accredited. The school is currently under-enrolled to the tune of about 3,000 students. The loss of that many students could possibly result in the state withdrawing funds for the school to the tune of at least $5 million, according to school officials in public meetings.

For further reading on the City College crisis from the students themselves, check out the following:

Can City College students transfer to SF State if the college closes?

25 percent of community colleges in California are under sanction

Discord at City College as accreditation cliff nears

Sasha Cuttler
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More than 300 City College of San Francisco (CCSF) faculty and supporters protested their chancellor’s “state of the school” address at CCSF’s Diego Rivera Theater on Friday (Jan.11) morning as the clock continues to tick down to March 15 — when the community college accrediting commission will decide the future of City College.

Teachers and administrators are now battling over the right way to meet the challenge of staying accredited. The administrators are trying desperately to “cut the fat,” and the teachers contend the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater.

As we’ve reported previously, CCSF’s new divide is over the use of the $14 million a year generated by the parcel tax voters created through Proposition A in November. The school’s administration still wants faculty to take an 8.8 percent pay cut, and already has over 70 faculty and staff “not being rehired” next semester. The school plans to use the money to shore up their fiscal reserves, one of the many sticking points the accrediting commission wanted them to adhere to in order to stay accredited and open.

The teachers see it differently. They volunteered and worked long hours, rallying and passing out flyers about Prop. A for months leading up to the election, with little to no financial support from administrators and the college’s Board of Trustees. They contend that Prop A’s language, which you can read online, specifically outlines that the money should be used to prevent layoffs — which the school has decided to do anyway.

The teachers, understandably, are upset.

“A lot of our teachers work really hard, and this is a slap in the face, frankly,” Greg Keech, the English as Second Language Department chair, said to faculty the day of the rally, outside the college’s Diego Rivera Theater.

The theater houses a giant, elaborate fresco, Diego Rivera’s World War II era mural “Pan-American Unity,” which depicts the 1940s working class laboring toward a common goal, a stark contrast to the college’s divisions. As the cries of the marchers echoed from just outside the door, CCSF’s chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman stood at the theater’s main stage defending City College’s faculty pay cuts and recent layoffs.

“Over the years, CCSF has managed to serve far more students than they had resources available, a very laudable goal,” Scott-Skillman said to her audience of mostly faculty and staff. “However, harsher austerity measures unfortunately are being implemented to address this imbalance.”

The San Francisco Chronicle seems to think Scott-Skillman has a point, writing an editorial siding with the administration. If the Chronicle and the college’s leadership had their way, the teachers would just shut-up and take their medicine.

“I think the protest today was an unproductive response to a house that’s burning down,” Steve Ngo, the newly re-elected college trustee, told us. “We’re trying to put out the fire, and [faculty] are arguing about the drapes.”

But teachers have good reason to be worried. When a commission with the power to close your school holds a gun to your head and essentially says, “You have one year to implement drastic reforms at your college that will last years, or we’ll close you down,” yeah, of course teachers are going to be worried about the lasting affects on their careers and their students.

Some of those changes are happening already, teachers told us.

“People without academic expertise, who don’t know the field, will lead the departments,” said Kristina Whalen, the director of the speech department at CCSF. “Academic reorganization will have automotive and child development under the same dean — those fields aren’t related.”

The previous model had teachers elected from within their own departments who represented those departments, leading to at least 60 department chairs at CCSF. The college has since consolidated those positions, and is moving to hire a smaller number of deans to handle the same jobs. Faculty who have worked under deans at other colleges didn’t have many kind things to say about the experience.

“I’ve worked at other schools where you reported to a dean,” art teacher Andrew Leone told us as rally-goers marched and yelled behind around him. He’s worked at San Francisco State University, and USF, among other schools, he said.  “The dean has so many responsibilities, there’s no way they can deal with them all.”

The chairpersons at City College were more efficient at taking care of teachers’ needs, he said. Now, “they’re giving us a top down corporate model. They’re turning us into Wal-mart.”

Meanwhile, the tally of concessions made to keep the college open keeps piling up. More than 160 teachers have left the school due to retirement and attrition without being replaced, and more than 50 faculty members and 30 staff have been reported as being let go so far, according to data from the teacher’s union, AFT 2121. The union won’t know the full number of faculty not rehired until early March, and the total amount of “not rehired teachers,” can be hard to track. Additionally, three school sites, Castro, Presidio and Fort Mason, will close soon.

Despite the drastic measures being taken, Interim-Chancellor Scott-Skillman made the case that arguing about them is a moot point.

“This college represents a promise to the surrounding communities that this is a place of quality and opportunity to acquire higher education, “Scott-Skillman said. “Reality check:  unfortunately, we can no longer keep that promise for everyone.”

Trustee Ngo took it a step further, saying that the protest could hurt the school’s chances at keeping its accreditation, especially in light of CCSF asking the state for an extension to the March 15 deadline for accreditation.

“These protests are hurting our chance for an extension,” Ngo said. “If [the accrediting commission] sees protests of our interim chancellor, they’ll think that, chances are, these people aren’t ready for change.”

Ngo could be right. Notably, the accreditation commission’s evaluation report of the college, which is the guiding document of what the college has to fix, called out the school’s divisions: “Despite the unified commitment to the college mission, there exists a veil of distrust among the governance groups that manifests itself as an indirect resistance to board and administrative decision-making authority.”

Beyond just the teachers, at least one person was happy to see the protest. CCSF student Kitty Lui , 26, is a a few units shy of transferring to San Francisco State, and sees the cuts at City College as a threat to her education, she said.

“We need good jobs, especially here in SF, so we’re not living paycheck to paycheck,” Lui said. “It’s inspiring to see so many teachers here — it gives me hope.”

CCSF teachers recruit students from BART/Muni stations

Sasha Cuttler
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CCSF teachers recruit students from BART/Muni stations

Walking through the Powell BART and Muni station, commuters are used to hearing the cries of a melange of musicians, crazies, and those with something to sell. Today and tomorrow though, commuters will hear something entirely different, as teachers cry “Enroll at City College! Enroll now!” through transit stations across San Francisco.

Teachers and faculty from the equally bedeviled and beloved school, City College of San Francisco, are out in force with flyers and laptops trying to shore up an enrollment deficit of 3,000 students. Today they’re at the Powell, Montgomery, and Embarcadero stations, handing out flyers and enrolling potential students on their laptops. Tomorrow, they’ll be at Civic Center, Mission, and Balboa street Muni and Bart stations doing the same.

The lack of student enrollment would deprive the school of $6.5 million dollars in state funding, which the school has responded to by cutting faculty and administrative salaries by 8.8 percent, and electing not to rehire, essentially letting go, 30-40 part time teachers, 18 part time counselors, and 30 clerical staff.

It’s no wonder these teachers are out on foot, enrolling as many folks as they can — and they say they’ve met with some success.

“I’ve been surprised how receptive people have been,” said Lizzie Brock, a basic skills English teacher at the college. Brock was on her feet handing out flyers for four hours, despite being about six months pregnant with her second child. “It’s a labor of love,” she said.

Though Brock only recently became a tenured teacher at the college, having taught there full-time for six years, she can’t afford to live in San Francisco on her salary from CCSF. She lives in Pacifica, commuting to the city to teach her classes.

Thomas Blair, a foreign language department head at CCSF who also teaches French, organized the two days of outreach. An older gentleman with snowy, neatly combed hair, and a kindly manner, he’s the last person you’d expect to sound the trumpets and gather 90 or so teachers to hit the pavement.

His passion for the college lies in these simple facts: he’s taught there for more than 30 years, and as a department head, he has a responsibility to all of the foreign language teachers at the college, and the thousands of students who open themselves to learning how to communicate with the world.

“I brought the table on the K with me all the way from Ocean Avenue,” Blair said. He thinks he has a pretty good chance of signing up new students from commuters, because those in the 30-55-year-old crowd are often the ones taking new languages at City College, he said. “The office workers are a very good segment for us now,” he said.

Guillermo Romero, a blueprint reading instructor at CCSF, was also there handing out flyers. Streams of people flew past Romero, but he was undeterred. Romero is confident that his classes will meet enrollment, simply because of his philosophy in teaching his class, he said.

“Disfrutando euseñando, disfrutando aprendieindo,” Romero said. If you enjoy teaching, they’ll enjoy learning — and hopefully be back for more.

Eviction of activist/gardener squatters follows HANC’s eviction

Sasha Cuttler
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Eviction of activist/gardener squatters follows HANC’s eviction

About 20 activist gardeners were thrown out of the old Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) Recycling Center space today, when Sheriff’s Department deputies and four park rangers surrounded the old HANC site and ordered them to leave.

It’s the second eviction on the same site this winter, as the recycling center that has been there for over 30 years before being ousted by city officials responding to neighborhood complaints about low-income recyclers. HANC was initially evicted on Dec. 27. In the wake of its closure, about 20 or so renegade gardeners set up a campground with their own urban gardening center in the space — with free seeds, soil, mulch and borrowable gardening tools for the community. 

The gardeners, wrapped in sleeping bags and inside tents, had a rude awakening this morning around 6am. At least 30 members of the Sheriff’s Department, led by Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, announced that they were trespassing and had five minutes to leave. 

“It was right at sun-up, and I was in my sleeping bag,” said Joash Bekele, a 28 year old environmental activist. “We thought they were coming [yesterday], we were up all night — worrying that they’d come.”

They didn’t have long to gather their gear, and a lot of their tools were left in the now locked HANC site, said Ryan Rising, one of the key organizers of the group. Most importantly, they lost their newly built miniature greenhouse, which they constructed themselves.

“A lot of this is about food justice,” Rising said. It’s a better alternative to the community garden that the Recreation and Parks Department (RPD) plans to build in the space, he said, because it would encourage community input in everything they do. 

“It would be a neighborhood space,” he said. 

RPD officials did not respond to emails before press time (UPDATED BELOW).

The group is now out on the sidewalk beside HANC, on Frederick Street. Along the fence of the old recycling center sits bags of soil and mulch, books on gardening, and a sign that reads “Welcome to the Golden Gate Recology Center.” 

The now-evicted gardeners answered questions about gardening from passers by, and offered tips on sustainable cooking and gardening to anyone who happens by with a question.

The group of “renegade gardeners” are meeting tonight to discuss their next plan of action, which may include staying on the sidewalk outside HANC, or finding a new space altogether, Rising said. 

The Sheriffs Department didn’t reach us by press time for comment (UPDATED BELOW), nor did Mirkarimi. A park ranger at the site, William Ramil, said that the eviction was a peaceful, orderly one.

As Ramil described the scene, we stood outside the locked gate to HANC. Three cars pulled up, a Lexus, a Saturn, and a Honda Hybrid, all customers looking for the recycling center.

Andrew Herwitz, behind the wheel of the Saturn, was surprised to see HANC closed. “Having places that are community-run are so important,” he said.

He said he was heading to the Safeway on Market Street with his recycling now, begrudgingly.

UPDATE 1/7: Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Kathy Gorwood disputed reports that there were about 30 deputies at the scene, but confirmed that the evictions were peaceful and with no arrests made, declining further comment. RPD spokesperson Sarah Ballard told us, “The Department is pleased to be moving forward with the neighborhood-supported plan for a community garden at the site.”

City College’s new divide

Sasha Cuttler
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City College’s new divide

Despite recent voter approval of Proposition A, the parcel tax expected to bring $14 million annually to City College of San Francisco, faculty there are enduring pay cuts and layoffs, a reality that has rankled union leaders and others who have rallied to save the school. 

In the face of the school’s accreditation crisis, which if not addressed by March could lead to its closure, the college was a united front to keep the school open and pass Prop. A, which was approved by over 70 percent of San Francisco voters on the same night as President Obama’s reelection.

But a combination of timing (the money won’t roll in until later in 2013), the depth of the district’s fiscal hole, and declining student enrollment have left CCSF with essentially status quo funding. District officials appear to be leaning toward using most of the surplus it does get to beef up its scant reserve funds, which was one of the things that triggered the accreditation crisis.  

After the good news of Prop. A’s passage, CCSF discovered it wasn’t on track to meet its required enrollment numbers — and the number of students enrolled dictates state funding.

“[The administration] was focused on these accreditation reports. It’s a big job. It was very disruptive to change chancellors kind of midstream,” said John Rizzo, the college’s board president. “We had to switch administrations, and that’s been very difficult.”

City College has been through three different chancellors in the past year: longtime Chancellor Don Q. Griffin left in April due to illness, Pamila Fisher was interim chancellor until October, and now Thelma Scott-Skillman is the current chancellor.

Whatever the reason, City College has 3,000 fewer students enrolled than it expected to have for the Spring, potentially putting it $6.5 million in the hole this coming year. It has until the end of summer to boost those numbers. Now, despite all the cards coming up aces for them in the polls, the college still needs to save millions of dollars somewhere else in the budget.

It has started by slashing faculty and administration wages 8.8 percent, and not renewing contracts for more than 30 part time teachers, 18 part time counselors, and 30 clerical staff. Notably, Scott-Skillman — whose office negotiated the plan, which the board discussed on Dec. 13 — will also take a paycut.

Alisa Messer, president of the faculty union at City College, thinks cutting teachers, and therefore classes, flies in the face of what the voters bargained for with Prop. A. “There’s no discussion here about accountability to San Francisco voters,” Messer told us. And with the loss of competitive wages, the faculty has already started to come apart at the seams.

“We have unfortunately heard from quite a few faculty that they will be looking for jobs out of state,” Messer said. “Many said they’ll have to change their living situation or move out of San Francisco.”

She said that would hurt CCSF: “These things have to do with the long term viability of the college.”

Steve Ngo, a trustee on the college’s board, thinks that the Prop. A money should be used to shore up the school’s reserve fund, as dictated by the accreditation team that threatens the school with closure. Unfortunately, this means losing teachers now rather than later.

“If you want to frame it in terms of labor, there’s nothing worse to do than spending money now [to retain teachers] and laying off teachers in the future,” Ngo said. “Those are younger teachers. The people there now will be retired.”

Due to increased focus on diversity in hiring, CCSF’s more diverse and younger teachers tend to be the newer ones, and part time faculty, Ngo said. Those are the teachers most at risk — and the ones that students will end up losing.

Amidst the arguments about proper use of funding, teachers at the school are seeing their wages cut. Some, like Danny Halford, are losing their jobs.

Halford taught English as a Second Language at City College for seven years. A friendly and outgoing middle-aged guy, Halford is a veritable man about town, and can be seen at City College fundraisers, and was among the college’s most ardent Prop. A supporters, waving picket signs and attending rallies.

He was also one of the part time faculty members to lose his job in the Spring.

“Greg Keech, our super-wonderful ESL Dept. chair, wrote me a very nice letter to inform me that due to budget cuts there will be no job for me next semester,” Halford said. He had also recently lost his job as an organist at the College Avenue Presbyterian Church, which he’d had for 10 years, when a new pastor had “a new music concept that I don’t fit,” he said.

One of his favorite memories from City College was of a student named Elmer, from Guatemala. “He came into my Literacy class in May 2006, near the end of my first semester, with almost no English.  He made progress quickly.”

“When he got his G.E.D. diploma, I was so proud of him, I could have bust,” Halford said. “I’ve watched him grow, off and on, for six years now. He has no family here, and I think of him as my nephew.”

He may even be re-hired next fall, but until then he waits in limbo. He’ll try to substitute teach at the college for now, he said, but ruled out looking at other schools for work. As he said, “There are no jobs at other colleges because all colleges are in the same boat.”

Ngo said that the choice is basically between drastic change, or the closure of the school.

“It’s mathematically impossible to keep that payrate now,” Ngo said. “My hope is to provide the best wages and benefits in the long run, but we can’t offer it if it’s a facade. We can’t maintain payrates as they are now because we have too many faculty…There’s no agreement if there’s no college.”

City College’s faculty’s union, American Federation of Teachers 2121, filed an unfair labor practice charge Dec. 21 with the Public Employee Relations Board, a state entity that has the power to enforce labor law in California. The charge alleges that the college’s paycuts are unlawful.

A recent email to their union members outlines the AFT 2121’s grievances with the college: “At Monday’s bargaining session, the District finally outlined its claim that it will cut wages to recover last year’s ongoing state cuts of $13 million—even though the parties bargained in good faith, reaching agreement on June 20, 2012 to address these losses, including the 2.85% wage reduction this year and millions of dollars in savings through attrition and program cuts. The District is essentially overriding the previous agreement by now moving to cut wages to recover $13 million on top of the already agreed to concessions.”

College spokesperson Larry Kamer said he hadn’t seen the charges yet, as the college is on vacation, but that “we respectfully disagree with AFT 2121’s characterization of the situation.”

“City College is facing an immediate budget shortfall due to a second straight year of missed enrollment targets,” he said. “In the past, City College might have papered over such a budget gap with money it didn’t have, but those days are over. The college remains in a perilous situation with regard to accreditation and has no choice but to respond to the crisis with swift action and a request for shared sacrifice.”

And there’s the rub. In the midst of reforming the school to meet the requirements of the accreditation team by March or face closure, the college failed to keep its eye on their enrollment.

“The unions were trying to help, calling prospective students and trying a pitch,” Rizzo said. “‘Hey enroll!’ That kind of thing. They’re helping. A lot of people are trying to chip in to help this.”

“Ultimately it’s the people in the administration who are responsible for the enrollment,” he said.

With City College’s newest Chancellor Scott-Skillman on track to stay for at least a year, some stability may return to college’s administration. But City College’s dilemma, to potentially strain its budget to the breaking point or to lose valued and experienced teachers, has no easy answers  — and either way the losers may end up being the students.

To register for classes at City College, visit ccsf.edu. Enrollment for Spring is open.

 

CCSF by the numbers:

Prop A - $14 million a year for 8 years starting in 2013
 
3,000 - the number of students city college needs to enroll in order to meet its budget expectations, or lose money
 
$6.5 million - the amount CCSF loses if it doesn't enroll 3,000 students
 
8.8 percent, the amount faculty wages are being cut
 
160 - faculty lost in the past year due to attrition - retirement, quitting
 
30 - part time faculty not rehired next semester, including ESL teacher Danny Halford
 
30 - clerical staff not rehired for next semester
 
18 - part time counselors not rehired next semester
 
3 - number of chancellors running City College over the past year

 

 

More recycling fallout

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84
More recycling fallout

The unintended consequences of closing the Haight Ashbury’s only recycling center are about to ripple through small businesses in the neighborhood. As the recycling center’s final days loom, merchants are gearing up to face new fees — as much as $100 a day.

But they may get a reprieve sooner than they think.

State law requires stores that sell beverages in cans and bottles to take them back for recycling — unless there’s a functioning recycling center within a half-mile radius.

With the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council recycling center gone, Whole Foods supermarket, the largest purveyor of beverages on Haight Street, will be faced with a decision — provide bottle and can buy-back services, or pay a $100 a day fee instead. If Whole Foods decides to pay the fee and not provide recycling in the area, small businesses in the Haight will be forced to make the same choice — only they won’t be able to afford the $36,500 a year fee.

San Francisco’s Department of the Environment doesn’t enforce those fees, but does provide oversight on recycling in San Francisco. Guillermo Rodriguez, spokesperson for the department, said that his office is in the planning stages of creating a mobile recycling center, which could roll out in early 2013.

“Certainly it’s not in our interest to have those businesses pack up and move out,” Rodriguez said. The mobile recycling center gives the neighborhood a new option.

If a recycling center serves the Haight neighborhood, the small businesses in the area could avoid paying the steep fees, and from having to go through the trouble of seeking exemption.

“Its similar to food trucks,” Rodriguez said. “After they finish for the day, they leave. But they’d set up at a usual time in a usual spot.”

San Francisco Supervisor Christina Olague, whose district includes the Haight Ashbury, said she was working on a way for HANC to turn into a mobile recycling center. Though she said that those talks had since stalled, Rodriguez said that if HANC wanted to be a partner in the new mobile center, the Department of the Environment would be open to it.

Why does the state of California expect small businesses to provide a can and bottle buy-back program on site, or face fees in the first place?

Rodriguez explained that the laws weren’t necessarily made with San Francisco in mind.

“When the rules were drafted, San Francisco was the exception, as we are for a lot of things,” Rodriguez told us. “The law was written for the suburbs, where small businesses generally have parking lots where recycling can easily be handled.”

The San Francisco Recreation and Parks department has long pushed for the Haight recycling center’s ouster. Sarah Ballard, spokesperson for the department, said the recycling fees and regulations that will hit local businesses aren’t Rec-Park’s problem.

“HANC has been on a month to month lease for over a decade,” she said. “The Parks Department have never sought to stop them from seeking non-park property to continue to run their business.”

Basically, HANC can operate wherever it wants to — just not in Golden Gate Park. And there aren’t a whole lot of other low-cost open spaces where the center can set up shop.

Small businesses we’ve talked to say they don’t have the space, staff, or ability to handle buying back recyclables. Fred Kazzouh, owner of “Fred’s New Lite Supermarket” on Haight and Masonic streets, doubted he’d get a reprieve from the fee.

“I mean if we all apply for an exemption, there’ll be half a mile radius without a recycling center,” Kazzouh said. “I saw recycling centers on Safeway on Webster (street) and I don’t see why Whole Foods can’t do it.”

Kazzouh’s store has been in the Haight neighborhood since 1995. The Haight has long been known as a place that draws alternative people, he said. And that’s the way he likes it.

“I don’t like to be in the clean neighborhood with the white picket fence and suits and ties,” Kazzouh said. “That’s not a real life. Its a very fake life.”

Even some of the ritzier stores along Haight St. aren’t bothered by the homeless population there. Firras Zawaideh, owner of Liquid Experience on Haight, sells high end (expensive) alcohol that few homeless people can afford.

He said he thinks only the transplants and new folks to San Francisco are bothered by them.

“I’m a native San Franciscan, from the Sunset [district],” Zawaideh said. “We’re the ones who don’t hate the homeless. Its all the transplants from New York and the midwest who complain about it.”

Zawaideh already handles bottle and can buy-back through his store, though he said that no one has ever taken advantage of it. But with HANC closing, he dreads the idea of people bringing cans and bottles en masse to his store.

“Say on a busy Friday night someone comes in with a cart full of recyclables,” he said. “Then what? I have to help them out too?”

The mobile recycling center would exempt Zawaideh of that responsibility. But if neighbors of HANC complained about the homeless population, would the same customers cause a problem for the mobile center as well?

Rodriguez said he wouldn’t speculate on if the homeless population that now uses the Haight recycling center would follow the food trucks around as well.

“I think we’ll have to take it as it comes,” Rodriguez said. Though he wanted this to be clear: “Not everyone that participates, frankly, is a homeless person.”

Fred Kazzouh was dubious that the homeless population would go away with HANC’s closure. “If HANC goes away, the homeless won’t go with them,” Kazzouh said. “The homeless will just have less people fighting for them.”

Sorry, Chuck — HANC eviction hasn’t happened

Zelda Bronstein
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14
Sorry, Chuck — HANC eviction hasn’t happened

The eviction of the Haight Asbury Neighborhood Council’s recycling center, which critics of the center said was scheduled to take place Dec. 5, hasn’t happened – and it’s entirely possible that the center could keep operating for several more weeks.

At the end of the day Wednesday, the doors were open, the center was continuing business as usual – and the office of Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who is charged with carrying out the eviction, was telling reporters that Dec. 5 was never a firm deadline.

Kathy Gorwood, Mirkarimi’s chief of staff, told us that the law gives tenants five days from the service of an eviction notice before any law-enforcement action can take place. “But that’s not a legal mandate that we evict on the sixth day,” she said.

The notice was served Nov. 30.

Gorwood said all evictions are planned with officer safety, tenant hardships and staff scheduling in mind – and on Dec. 5, the sheriff wasn’t ready to move.

“We surveyed the property, the sheriff personally surveyed the property,” she said. “We can’t say, and we don’t say, when an eviction will take place.”

Gorwood said Mirkarimi wasn’t defying the law or refusing to carry out the eviction. But since there are likely to be protests, possibly civil disobedience, the deputies need to be prepared and the schedule set carefully.

Mirkarimi has a history of supporting HANC. As a former supervisor of District 5, which includes the Haight, he voted to urge SF Rec and Park to and find a solution to keep the center in Golden Gate Park. The vote was nonbinding. He clearly wants to avoid a nasty confrontation, and if he can find a way to work out a voluntary move-out, it’s likely he’ll take the time to negotiate it.

For the past ten years, The Department of Recreation and Parks has aggressively sought to oust HANC.  Finally, this fall, Rec-Park filed an eviction through the City Attorney’s Office
Interestingly, the “Notice to Vacate” served on the center was signed off by the City Attorney’s Office on September 14, 2012. However, the actual eviction date that SF Rec and Park requested was December 5, 2012.

Why wait three months to evict a center that Rec-Park has been trying to get rid of for a decade?

Jack Fong, a spokesperson for the City Attorney’s office, declined to say if there were any procedural or administrative reasons that an eviction notice given to the sheriff in September would take three months to go through.

We called Phil Ginsburg, director of Rec and Parks, and Sarah Ballard, its spokesperson, to ask about the time disparity. We did not hear back from them before press time.

But you don’t need to be a genius to figure it out — just look at what was happening in November. Ginsburg was pushing Proposition B, which secured $195 million in bonds to shore up neglected playgrounds and open spaces in San Francisco’s parks. The measure needed a two-thirds vote – and Rec-Park was nervous about any bad publicity.

The measure passed by a landslide. Butousting HANC, eliminating a revenue stream for the poor, the homeless, and working class people, would have been bad publicity leading up the November election.

The Small Business Commission is scrambling to notify businesses in the area of their possible new role without the recycling center — they could all either become mini-recycling centers, or
face a $100 a day charge from the state of California.

Exactly how and when the commission will reach out to those affected will be discussed at the Small Business Commission’s December 10 meeting.

Regina Dick-Endrizzi, the executive director of the Small Business Commission, told us that one business in the SOMA, which she declined to name, faced three months worth of the $100-a-
day charge for not buying back recyclables from the state while trying to navigate applying for an exemption. Even after being granted the exemption, that’s a $9,000 charge, which for a small
liquor store or grocer is not chump change.

There’s a precedent for a San Francisco sheriff refusing to carry out an eviction notice. Sheriff Richard Hongisto, who later served on the board of supervisors for three terms, famously
refused to evict the Filipino and Chinese elderly tenants of the International Hotel in 1976. The scandal was even the subject of a documentary, “The Fall of the I-Hotel.

The International Hotel was sold to developers who were going to cast the elderly tenants out onto the street. News outlets as far flung as the New York and LA times wrote about the
mass eviction, and many consider it a black eye on San Francisco to this day.

In January 1977, Hongisto was jailed for five days for his refusal to evict the tenants. Eventually, he relented, leading a team of SWAT and other officers to clear the hotel of
protesters, and even swung an ax himself to bust open the hotel.

But this is a different situation: Mirkarimi hasn’t refused to follow the law, and in fact, Gorwood said that he has every intention of carrying out the eviction. The law, Mark Nicco, assistant counsel to the sheriff, told us, only says that an eviction has to happen in a timely manner – and there’s no definition of what that might be.

So if Ginsburg or the mayor think Mirkarimi is dragging his feet, the only recourse would be for Rec-Park to go to court and seek a judge’s order compelling the sheriff to evict the center in a stated period of time. All of which could take weeks.

So for the moment, HANC is still in business, Mirkarimi is avoiding an ugly eviction scene – and there’s still a chance for Rec-Park to come to its senses. But we’re not taking bets.

Additional reporting by Tim Redmond

Guns in Bayview

Andrew Lam
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Guns in Bayview

The National Rifle Association’s bid to kill two San Francisco gun control ordinances — which a federal judge initially rejected last week, although that legal process continues — highlights differing views on the issue in the violence-plagued Bayview, where two prominent activists have opposing viewpoints.

One ordinance requires guns in the home to be locked up when not on the owner’s person and the second bans the sale of fragmenting and expanding bullets, affecting only the city’s sole gun store: High Bridge Arms, in the Mission district.

The first ordinance was introduced in 2007 by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and supported by Sheriff and then-Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and opposed by three supervisors: Ed Jew, Aaron Peskin, and Chris Daly. City Attorney Dennis Herrera was pleased at the judge’s ruling.

“The NRA took aim at San Francisco’s Police Code,” Herrera said in a press release. “I’m proud of the efforts we’ve made to beat back these legal challenges, and preserve local laws that can save lives.”

NRA attorney C.D. Michel told the San Francisco Examiner, “This is not over, not by a long shot…What if you’re old and need glasses in the middle of the night, or you have kids at home to protect? Why are they being forced to keep their guns locked up?”

Interestingly, its not the NRA’s name on the front of the lawsuit, entitled “Espanola Jackson v. City and County of San Francisco.”

Jackson, a San Francisco native and longtime Bayview Hunter’s Point civil rights activist, has been fighting for the rights of minorities since she was old enough to hold a picket sign. She was recognized last May by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission with a “Legacy Award for a Lifetime in Human Rights Advocacy.”

So why is she advocating for unlocked guns in the home, and more lethal bullets?

“I live in the Bayview and I’m 79 years old,” she told The Guardian. “We’re mostly single women, but we need to have protection.”

She cited a recent police report she’d read of an elderly woman being assaulted by several teenage girls, just blocks from her home, as one of the many reasons she feels she needs protection in her own neighborhood.

Jackson said she’s had a lifetime of training with her firearm, although she wouldn’t identify the kind of weapon she wield. Back in the ’60s, she said, “they were calling us pistol packing mamas.” It’s that history, she said, that makes her feel safest with a gun in her drawer, where she can easily get it in case of a robbery.

But Theo Ellington — a board member of the Bayview Opera House and the Southeast Community Facilities Commission — sees the issue differently. Notably, as a member of the Young Black Democrats, he led the opposition against Mayor Ed Lee’s proposal to introduce “Stop and Frisk” policing to San Francisco. Lee abandoned the idea after activists cited rampant civil rights abuses under the policy in New York City.

Ellington thinks that overturning the San Francisco’s gun ordinances would be a bad idea. “We face a much greater risk if we fail to take measures to prevent [gun] accidents,” Ellington told us. “The last thing we want is for any weapons to be in the hands of children or for potential misuse.”

He has reason to be worried about the Bayview. Recent city statistics show an upswing in most crime categories in the district from 2011 to 2012, from homicides and rape to vehicle theft and burglaries. National studies have shown gun owners or their family members are more likely to get shot by guns kept in homes than are intruders. Public safety means different things in different areas, Ellington said, especially “when we’re dealing with a population that is plagued by gun violence.”

Canned!

Andrew Lam
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6
Canned!

news@sfbg.com

So much for the holiday spirit.

In a win for the NIMBY neighbors of the Haight neighborhood, the Haight Ashbury Recycling Center was gifted with its final eviction notice, ordering it out on the street by the day this story goes to print, Dec. 5.

But those who hoped this eviction would rid the neighborhood of poor people recycling bottles and cans may be disappointed — and so might local small businesses that could face some unintended consequences of the move.

The site, run by the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC), houses a community garden, native plant nursery, and recycling center. HANC battled eviction for nearly a decade as newer neighborhood associations complained to the city, saying the center was too noisy and attracted too many homeless people.

The recycling center is located at the edge of Golden Gate Park behind Kezar stadium, and has been crushing cans and busting bottles since 1974.

The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department issued several eviction notices to HANC over the years, and the process seemed to drag on, but the eviction notice from the Sheriff’s Department on Nov. 28 is likely the last nail in the coffin.

“We’ve exhausted our legal options,” Ed Dunn, HANC’s director, told us.

Even Sup. Christina Olague, who has championed HANC as one of their few supporters on the current Board of Supervisors, said that the recycling center was done, although representatives from Sup. Eric Mar’s office told us they were still hopeful the eviction could be delayed long enough to relocate HANC somewhere else.

Olague told us that she’d talked to Mayor Ed Lee about the issue many times, and they discussed many options. But with the finality of the eviction notice, she said, “I just don’t know what we can do.”

 

COAL FOR CHRISTMAS

The recycling center’s employees will lose their jobs just at the start of the winter holiday season. “The notion that they’d put people out of work before Christmas was horrendous,” Dunn said.

What will happen to HANC’s 10 employees is up in the air. “I have no idea what I’ll do,” HANC employee Brian McMahon told us, lowering his orange protective headphones to talk. He’s worked there since 1989, and his last job was at a Goodwill store. “The quote under my high school yearbook picture says ‘take it as it comes,’ and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Susan Fahey, the sheriff’s media relations officer, declined to discuss the details of how the officers would handle the eviction, saying only that “we plan accordingly.”

A staff report prepared for the Recreation and Park Commission’s Nov. 20 meeting estimated that just 0.1 percent of San Francisco’s recycling tonnage is processed at HANC, according to a report by citizen journalist Adrian Rodriguez. The agenda also said that the Department of Environment was confident that recyclers would use other nearby sites instead.

But the customers at HANC that we talked to didn’t agree.

“I think it’s necessary they have the [recycling center] here,” HANC customer Eugene Wong told us. Wong lives in the Haight, and hauls in his recyclables every six months or so for some extra pocket money. As Wong and his friend Bob Boston spoke, one of their Haight Ashbury neighbors, Rory O’Connor, surprised them as he walked up.

“Just droppin’ off my beer cans, man,” O’Connor said. Asked if he would make his way out to the Bayview recycling center when HANC closed, he said, “You’ll spend more on gas than you would even get back.”

There were quite a few neighborhood locals there that day, and more people drove into the recycling center than there were people pushing shopping carts. But it’s the folks with the shopping carts that had HANC’s opponents up in arms.

And though some — like Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius, a regular critic of HANC — are celebrating HANC’s demise, the unintended consequences should have all small businesses in the Haight Ashbury worried.

 

CLASS WARFARE BACKFIRES

State law requires that Californians have easy access to a “convenience zone,” basically somewhere nearby that they can collect the five-cent deposit all consumers pay for cans and bottles. HANC served that purpose for a half mile radius around its location on Frederick, near Stanyan.

“Whole Foods and Andronico’s were serviced by HANC’s existence,” Regina Dick-Endrizzi, the director of San Francisco’s Office of Small Business, told us. With HANC gone, “They will be required to buy back [bottles and cans] from local stores.”

San Francisco’s Department of Environment oversees recycling policy in the city, but did not respond to calls or emails.

The reason that HANC was being pushed out was due to a vocal few, like the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, complaining that HANC was a magnet to the homeless population looking to sell bottles and cans collected in shopping carts. That group didn’t respond by press time. Now those same poor folks may take their business from Golden Gate Park to the Haight neighborhood itself by recycling at the local Whole Foods, the new legal alternative to HANC.

Sometimes local grocery stores defy the state mandate, and instead choose to pay a state-mandated fee, Dick-Endrizzi said. If Whole Foods chooses not buy back recyclables, small businesses all over the Haight will be required by state law to do it themselves.

Suhail Sabba has owned Parkview Liquors on Stanyan Street, just two blocks from HANC, for nine years. He said that he doesn’t have the employees, storage, or scale “to handle even a portion of HANC’s customers.”

He may not have much of a choice. If small businesses don’t buy back the recyclables, they would face charges of $100 a day under California state law. A year gone without complying would lead to charges up to $36,000, an amount that large-scale businesses often factor into their budgets, but which could bankrupt a small store.

When contacted, Whole Foods representative Adam Smith said that the company was aware of the issue and was still deciding on a course of action.

The company has a 60-day grace period to make a decision that, for good or ill, would ripple through the Haight neighborhood. “I might go out of business,” Sabba said.

Store owners can apply for an exemption, but the process can be as lengthy as a few months and fines could still accrue, Dick-Endrizzi said. The Office of Small Business will soon reach out to the affected store owners, but she encourages them to contact her office directly at 415-554-6134.

 

GARDEN FOR A GARDEN

The HANC site houses more than the recycling center. It also encompasses a native plant nursery, run for the past decade by caretaker Greg Gaar, who we’ve profiled before (“Reduce, reuse, replace,” 5/30/12). Gaar raises Dune Tansy, Beach Sagewort, Coast Buckwheat and Bush Monkey — all native plants bred from the dunes of old San Francisco, which Golden Gate Park used to be.

Adjacent to the nursery is a community garden with 50 plots serving just more than 100 neighbors. But the odd part is, when the city is done tearing down the recycling center and gardens, it plans to put in, well, another community garden, at taxpayer expense.

The new plan does offer a few tweaks. There will be a small stone Greek-style amphitheater, and removing the recycling center will leave more green space for the site. The new community garden will feature 10 fewer plots. As of now, there is no formal plan to transfer the 100 gardeners from HANC’s community gardens to the new plots once they’ve been built.

Some of HANC’s current gardeners count among the local homeless population, said Soumyaa Behrens, HANC’s social media coordinator. Those few homeless use their plots to grow food.

“You meet people you wouldn’t meet anywhere else,” said Miriam Pinchuck, a writer who will soon lose her and her husband’s garden plot at HANC. “It’s very shortsighted, and it’d deprive us of a chance to meet our neighbors.”

Though Dunn and Gaar are in negotiations with city officials on their gardners’ behalf, at this point it looks like the current gardeners will need to sign up for the new plots, just like everybody else.

Gaar looks like he may be the only employee to work at the new garden site once it replaces the recycling center. He’d have to volunteer, but he said that doesn’t necessarily bother him.

“For me, gardening is a joy,” Gaar said, although he did voice one concern: “I just want the nursery to survive.” With HANC’s eviction, it seems like everyone has something to worry about.

HANC evicted, but the poor recyclers could remain in the Haight

Erica Hanna
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36
HANC evicted, but the poor recyclers could remain in the Haight

In a win for the gentrifiers of the Haight Ashbury, the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council’s (HANC) Recycling Center has been issued an official eviction notice, posted by the Sheriff’s Department, and is slated to be out on the street by this Wednesday, Dec. 5. But those who hoped this would rid the neighborhood of poor people recycling bottles and cans may be disappointed.

The HANC site in Golden Gate Park — which houses a community garden, native plant nursery, and recycling center — has been battling eviction pushed by the Mayor’s Office and mayoral appointees for nearly a decade. Previously, the city Recreation and Park Department pushed for HANC to leave, a stand reinforced by court rulings, but the eviction notice looks like the last nail in the coffin. The recycling center’s employees will lose their jobs just as the winter holiday season begins.

“The notion that they’d put people out of work before Christmas was horrendous,” said Ed Dunn, HANC’s director. The eviction caught him totally flat footed, as he had just last week given a tour to San Francisco officials interested in mediating the dispute.

“It seemed like there was growing awareness that we’re a public good,” Dunn said. “I guess that went nowhere.”

Deputies posted the eviction notice at HANC’s doors on Wednesday, Nov. 28. Susan Fahey, the Sheriff’s Department media relations officer, declined to discuss the details on how the department would handle the eviction, saying only that “we plan accordingly.”

And though some, like Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius, are celebrating HANC’s demise, the unintended consequences should have all small businesses in the Haight Ashbury worried.

 State law requires that Californians have easy access to a “convenience zone,” basically somewhere nearby that they can sell the cans and bottles and get back the “redemption” fee charge to consumers. HANC served that purpose for a half mile radius around its location on Frederick, near Stanyan.

“My position is we have to understand the full potential of the decision we’re making,” Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of San Francisco’s Office of Small Business, told us. Namely, that without HANC, two local grocers will have to pick up the slack and buy back the bottles and cans they sell.

“Whole Foods and Andronicos were serviced by HANC’s existence,” Dick-Endrizzi said. With HANC gone, “they will be required to buy back [bottles and cans] from local stores.”

The whole reason that HANC was being pushed out in the first place was due to a vocal few, like the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, saying that HANC was a magnet to the homeless population and their shopping carts filled with bottles and cans. Now those same poor folks may take their business from Golden Gate Park to the Haight neighborhood itself, frequenting the local Whole Foods, defeating the whole purpose behind the opposition’s scorn for HANC.

But sometimes local grocery stores defy the state mandate, and instead choose to pay state fines, Dick-Endrizzi said. If they choose not to take recyclables, small businesses all over the Haight would be required to individually pay customers for their used recyclables.

If they don’t, small businesses could be fined as $100 a day under state law. A year gone without dealing with the issue could cripple a business, with fines up to $36,000.

When contacted, Whole Foods representative Adam Smith said that the company was aware of the issue and was still deciding on a course of action for the neighborhood.

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