Rebecca Bowe

Free at last

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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20

An ordeal lasting more than two years for Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal came to an end in Iran today, when the two 29-year-old University of California Berkeley grads were freed at last from Tehran’s Evin Prison.

CNN reports that Bauer and Fattal were transported from the Iranian prison to an international airport just before nightfall, accompanied by Swiss and Omani officials. They were bound for Muscat, the Omani capital, where arrangements had been made for them to meet with their families and Sarah Shourd, Bauer’s fiancee, who was arrested along with them in July of 2009 while on a hiking trip in Iraqi Kurdistan. Shourd was released in what Iran characterized as a humanitarian gesture last year, after spending 410 days in solitary confinement.

“Today can only be described as the best day of our lives,” a statement from the families said in response to the news that they had finally been released. “We have waited for nearly 26 months for this moment and the joy and relief we feel at Shane and Josh’s long-awaited freedom knows no bounds. We now all want nothing more than to wrap Shane and Josh in our arms, catch up on two lost years and make a new beginning, for them and for all of us.”

Last month, Bauer and Fattal were convicted of spying and illegally entering the country and sentenced to eight years in prison each, despite a lack of evidence and repeated statements by President Barack Obama that they had never worked for the U.S. government.

Yet human rights activists advocating for their release have characterized the Iranian government’s decision to continue holding them as a political tactic to begin with, and some observers didn’t take the outcome of the trial at face value.

The fact that they stood trial after two years of being detained was interpreted as potentially a positive signal by some supporters advocating for their release.
News of their conviction and harsh eight-year sentences also brought kernels of hope, ironically, for some who speculated that the severe outcome of their trial might figure into a broader plan to grant their pardon, setting the Iranian government up for an opportuinity to take credit on the world stage for a merciful act just as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad headed to the United States for the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

However, unexpected delays and hints that the hikers were caught up amid an internal power struggle in Iran kept friends and supporters in a state of agonizing suspense over the past week. On Sept. 13, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated publicly that Bauer and Fattal could be freed “in a couple of days.”
 
But that statement had come to nothing by Sept. 16, when supporters from the Bay Area gathered in San Francisco in hopes that an announcement would be made. The following day, reports surfaced that an Iranian lawyer trying to free them was waiting on the signature of a judge who was on vacation until Sept. 20 before their release could go forward.

Bauer and Fattal were released on $1 million bail, a sum CNN reported was paid by the Omani government.

Bauer, Fattal and Shourd are social-justice advocates, antiwar activists, writers, environmentalists, travelers, and creative thinkers with deep ties to the Bay Area. Shourd and Bauer had been living in Syria when they joined with Fattal, who was visiting, and embarked on the ill-fated hiking trip in Iraqi Kurdistan in July of 2009. Shourd, who lives in Oakland, was teaching English to Iraqi refugees when she was in Syria, as well as practicing some journalism. Fattal, who taught at Aprovecho — an education center in Oregon focused on sustainability and permaculture — had been traveling to India, South Africa, and other places through the International Honors Program to lead workshops on health and sustainable technology before visiting his friends in Syria.

Bauer wrote for publications such as The Nation, Mother Jones, and the Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. A photojournalist who has won multiple awards and had his work published internationally, he’s documented stories ranging from tenant conditions in San Francisco SROs to conflict-ridden regions in Africa and the Middle East.

Their imprisonment prompted an international response. Calls for their release were issued by Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, human rights activists, religious leaders, authors, celebrities, and hundreds of supporters who wrote letters, displayed banners, and raised money for efforts pushing for their release. A host of family members, friends, and supporters organized under an effort called Free the Hikers worked steadily to free them, and their long-anticipated reunion with Bauer and Fattal has finally arrived.

Deep-pocketed Lee supporter aims to take back S.F. from progressives

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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1

Power brokers Willie Brown and Rose Pak aren’t nearly the only influential backers working behind the scenes to help elect Mayor Ed Lee to a full term. Three different committees have been set up to support his candidacy and are fundraising independently from his official campaign, according to Ethics Commission filings.

The principal officer and treasurer of one of these independent expenditure committees are, respectively, a Republican Silicon Valley tech investor who’s spoken publicly about taking San Francisco back from progressives, and a political attorney who worked on Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s failed yet stunningly expensive Proposition 16 campaign.

“San Franciscans for Jobs and Good Government, Supporting Ed Lee for Mayor 2011,” was created in late August with a San Rafael address, according to an Ethics filing. Its principal officer is Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley angel investor who made his fortune in the tech industry. Conway was quoted in a San Francisco Business Times article last year as saying “we must take our city back” from progressives, a rallying cry he delivered at a dinner hosted by the the Bay Area Council, a business association. A book written about Conway by Gary Rivlin dubs him “The Godfather of Silicon Valley.”

According to campaign finance records, Conway, a registered Republican, has donated more than $320,000 to Republican state and federal candidates since 1999. He also contributed $1,000 to a Draft Ed Lee for Mayor committee, a separate effort from Progress for All which was formed before Lee announced his candidacy to encourage him to run. Conway has made substantial contributions to Democratic hopefuls, too, but the majority of his campaign donations over the last decade have benefited GOP candidates.

The treasurer of “San Franciscans for Jobs and Good Government” is Elli Abdoli, a political attorney who works in the San Rafael office of Nielsen Merksamer Parrinello Mueller & Naylor, a heavyweight political firm based in Sacramento whose services were tapped last year by PG&E to advance the Proposition 16 ballot initiative that the company bankrolled. Prop 16 was designed to crush municipal power programs that threatened to compete with PG&E by requiring a supermajority approval of the voters before they could move forward. Despite sinking more than $45 million into that campaign, voters rejected Prop. 16.

Abdoli served as the assistant treasurer for the Yes on 16 committee, according to a form filed with the Fair Political Practices Commission. She was listed as a contact for the “San Franciscans for Jobs and Good Government” committee and had not returned calls by press time.

 

Hikers could be freed within days

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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1
Hikers could be freed within days

Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, the American hikers who have been detained in Iran for more than two years, could be freed “in a couple of days,” according to statements made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on NBC’s “Today” show and reported by the Associated Press. An Iranian court has set bail for each of them at $500,000, clearing the way for their release.

Bauer and Fattal, both 29, were first taken to prison after Iranian officials picked them up while hiking near the Iranian border in Northern Iraq in July of 2009. They were taken into custody along with Sarah Shourd, Bauer’s fiancee, who was released last year. Shourd, working alongside friends and family members, has organized numerous events in the Bay Area since returning to the United States to aid in the effort to free the hikers.

“While we do not have further details at this time, we are overjoyed by the positive news reports from Iran,” the hikers’ families noted in a statement. “Shane and Josh’s freedom means more to us than anything and it’s a huge relief to read that they are going to be released. We’re grateful to everyone who has supported us and looking forward to our reunion with Shane and Josh. We hope to say more when they are finally back in our arms.”

Powell station shut down by BART protest

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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35

A Sept. 8 protest called to test the limits of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency’s policies on freedom of speech inside BART stations ended in a cluster of protesters and journalists being coralled by nightstick-wielding BART officers, detained, and in some cases, arrested. The station was shut down at around 6 p.m. when police surrounded a group of demonstrators who had marched around the unpaid area of the transit station, as well as a group of media who were following them with cameras and voice recorders.

It was unclear at press time just how many arrests were made, but it is clear that things did not go as planned from the perspective of either the protesters or the transit agency. As the demonstration got underway, one of the No Justice No BART protest organizers, Christopher Cantor, told reporters, “We are here to test free speech limitations at BART, but more importantly, we’re here to say we don’t trust BART, we don’t trust BART to protect us, we don’t trust BART to interpret the constitution.” He also said that none of them were there to get arrested.

Before the banners and bullhorns came out, BART spokesperson Jim Allison told the Guardian that if BART police deemed a gathering inside the unpaid area of the station to be dangerous, “we would ask people to disperse.” If they didn’t disperse, “we would declare an unlawful assembly.” Allison said protesters were free to exercise their first amendment rights to protest inside the areas of the station that don’t require a ticket to enter. He said people could do that as long as they were not “interrupting or interfering” with regular service. When the Guardian caught up with Allison after the protest by phone to find out why his statements about the dispersal order were contradicted by police activity, he refused to answer our questions, directing us instead to watch a press conference on the BART website.

“I’m going off duty,” he said after calling the Guardian in response to a page, after being asked several times why BART police had not issued a dispersal order before surrounding people and arresting them. “I simply cannot devote the rest of my night to answering your questions.”

Here’s what Cantor said just before the march around the station got underway:

Before police closed in, the protest featured some 60 protesters chanting things like, “How can they protect and serve us? The BART police just make me nervous.” One banner, from a group called Feminists Against Cops, read, “Disarm BART, Arm Feminists.”

Things heated up when the protest got closer to the fare gates, at which point police may have determined that protesters were interfering with service. At one point, police tackled a masked demonstrator to the ground. However, when people were detained, they were not standing directly in front of the fare gates.

Police did not make any public statements indicating that the situation had been deemed unlawful before surrounding the group of detainees, nor did they issue a dispersal order. We were told that we were not free to leave.

While I was detained along with Luke Thomas, a reporter from the popular political Fog City Journal, and freelance reporter Josh Wolf, an officer told us that we were being detained on suspected violation of California Penal Code 369-i, which prohibits interfering with the operations of a railroad.

Thomas phoned Matt Gonzalez, former president of the Board of Supervisors and now a chief attorney with the Public Defender’s office, to ask about that law. Gonzalez looked it up and told him that there was an exception to that law which “does not prohibit picketing in the adjacent area of any property” belonging to a railroad. So it would seem that the protesters, along with more than a dozen journalists, were being unlawfully detained. When we put this question to one of the officers who stood holding a nightstick and blocking us in, he refused to address the issue directly, repeating that we weren’t free to leave.

Members of the press with San Francisco Police Department issued credentials were made to line up and present their press passes to San Francisco police officers, who had been called in to assist. The police officers took away media’s press passes, saying it was SFPD property and could be retrieved later — which meant that if journalists had opted to stay and cover any further police activity, we would have had no way of presenting credentials to avoid arrest. We were issued Certificates of Release and ushered outside of the station, where it was impossible to see what was happening, and therefore, impossible to do our jobs as reporters.

Just outside, San Francisco State lecturer Justin Beck was very concerned that several of his journalism students, whom he’d sent on assignment to cover the protest, were being detained. They did not have SFPD issued press passes and at that time were not being allowed to exit the station.

 

 

 

Team Avalos

Andrew Lam
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63
Team Avalos

When Supervisor John Avalos chaired the Budget & Finance Committee in 2009 and 2010, his office became a bustling place in the thick of the budget process. To gain insight on the real-life effects of the mayor’s proposed spending cuts, Avalos and his City Hall staff played host to neighborhood service providers, youth workers, homeless advocates, labor leaders, and other San Franciscans who stood to be directly impacted by the axe that would fall when the final budget was approved. They camped out in City Hall together for hours, puzzling over which items they could live without, and which required a steadfast demand for funding restoration.

“One year, we even brought them into the mayor’s office,” for an eleventh-hour negotiating session held in the wee morning hours, recounted Avalos’ legislative aide, Raquel Redondiez. That move came much to the dismay of Steve Kawa, mayoral chief of staff.

Avalos, the 47-year-old District 11 supervisor, exudes a down-to-earth vibe that’s rare in politicians, and tends to display a balanced temperament even in the heat of high-stakes political clashes. He travels to and from mayoral debates by bicycle. He quotes classic song lyrics during full board meetings, keeps a record player and vinyl collection in his office, and recently showed up at the Mission dive bar El Rio to judge a dance competition for the wildly popular Hard French dance party.

Yet casual observers may not be as familiar with the style Avalos brings to conducting day-to-day business at City Hall, an approach exemplified that summer night in 2010 when he showed up to the mayor’s office flanked by grassroots advocates bent on preserving key programs.

“My role is, I’m an insider, … but it’s really been about bringing in the outside to have a voice on the inside,” Avalos said in a recent interview. “People have always been camped out in my office. These are people who represent constituencies — seniors, recipients of mental health care, unions, people concerned about violence. It’s how we change things in City Hall. It’s making government more effective at promoting opportunities, justice, and greater livelihood.” Part of the thrust behind his candidacy, he added, is this: “We want to be able to have a campaign that’s about a movement.”

That makes Avalos different from the other candidates — but it also raises a crucial question. Some of the most important advances in progressive politics in San Francisco have come not just from electoral victories, but from losing campaigns that galvanized the left. Tom Ammiano in 1999 and Matt Gonzalez in 2003 played that role. Can Avalos mount both a winning campaign — and one that, win or lose, will have a lasting impact on the city?

Workers and families

No budget with such deep spending cuts could have left all stakeholders happy once the dust settled, but Avalos and other progressive supervisors did manage to siphon some funding away from the city’s robust police and fire departments in order to restore key programs in a highly controversial move.

“There’s a Johnny Cash song I really like, written by Tom Petty, called ‘I Won’t Back Down.’ I sang it during that time, because I didn’t back down,” Avalos said at an Aug. 30 mayoral forum hosted by the Potrero Hill Democratic Club. “We made … a symbolic cut, showing that there was a real inequity about how we were doing our budgets. Without impacting public safety services, we were able to get $6 million from the Fire Department. A lot of that went into Rec & Park, and health care programs, and to education programs, and we were able to … find more fat in the Police Department budget than anybody had ever found before, about $3 million.”

Last November, Avalos placed a successful measure on the ballot to increase the city’s real-estate transfer tax, which so far has amassed around $45 million in new revenue for city coffers, softening the blow to critical programs in the latest round of budget negotiations. “Without these measures that community groups, residents, and labor organizations worked for, Mayor Ed Lee would not have been able to balance the budget,” Avalos said.

More recently, he emerged as a champion of the city’s Local Hire Ordinance, designed as a tool for job creation that requires employers at new construction projects to select San Francisco residents for half their work crews, to be phased in over the next several years. That landmark legislation was a year in the making, Redondiez said, describing how union representatives, workers, contractors, unemployed residents of Chinatown and the Bayview, and others cycled through Avalos’ City Hall office to provide input.

His collaborative style stems in part from his background. Avalos formerly worked for Service Employees International Union Local 1877, where he organized janitors, and served as political director for Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth. He was also a legislative aide to former District 6 Sup. Chris Daly, who remains a lightning rod in the San Francisco political landscape.

Before wading into the fray of San Francisco politics, Avalos earned a masters degree in social work from San Francisco State University. But when he first arrived in the city in 1989, with few connections and barely any money to his name, he took a gig at a coffee cart. He was a Latino kid originally from Wilmington, Calif. whose dad was a longshoreman and whose mom was an office worker, and he’d endured a climate of discrimination throughout his teenage years at Andover High in Andover, Mass.

Roughly a decade ago, Avalos and a group of youth advocates were arrested in Oakland following a protest against Proposition 21, which increased criminal penalties for crimes committed by youth. Booked into custody along with him was his wife, Karen Zapata, whom he married around the same time. She is now a public school teacher in San Francisco and the mother of their two children, ages 6 and 9, both enrolled in public schools.

“John has consistently been a voice for disenfranchised populations in this city,” said Sharen Hewitt, who’s known Avalos for more than a decade and serves as executive director of The Community Leadership Academy & Emergency Response Project (CLAER), an organization formed to respond to a rash of homicides and alleviate violence. “He understands that San Francisco is at a major turning point in terms of its ability to keep families and low-income communities housed. With the local hiring ordinance, most of us who have been working around violence prevention agree — at the core of this horrible set of symptoms are root causes, stemming from economic disparity.”

Asked about his top priorities, Avalos will invariably express his desire to keep working families rooted in San Francisco. District 11, which spans the Excelsior, Ingleside, and other southeastern neighborhoods, encompasses multiracial neighborhoods made up of single-family homes — and many have been blunted with foreclosure since the onset of the economic crisis.

“Our motto for building housing in San Francisco is we build all this luxury housing — it’s a form of voodoo economics,” Avalos told a small group of supporters at a recent campaign stop in Bernal Heights. “I want to have a new model for how we build housing in San Francisco. How can we help [working-class homeowners] modify their loans to make if more flexible, so they can stay here?” He’s floated the idea of creating an affordable housing bond to aid in the construction of new affordable housing units as well as loan modifications to prevent foreclosures.

“That’s what is the biggest threat to San Francisco, is losing the working-class,” said community activist Giuliana Milanese, who previously worked with Avalos at Coleman Advocates for Youth and has volunteered for his campaign. “And he’s the best fighter. Basically, economic justice is his bottom line.”

Tenants Union director Ted Gullicksen gave Avalos his seal of approval when contacted by the Guardian, saying he has “a 100 percent voting record for tenants,” despite having fewer tenants in his district than some of his colleagues. “David Chiu, had he not voted for Parkmerced, could have been competitive with John,” Gullicksen said. “But the Parkmerced thing was huge, so now it’s very difficult to even have David in same ballpark. Dennis [Herrera] has always taken the right positions — but he’s never had to vote on anything,” he said. “After that, nobody comes close.”

Cash poor, community rich

There’s no question: The Avalos for Mayor campaign faces an uphill climb. Recent poll figures offering an early snapshot of the crowded field peg him at roughly 4 percent, trailing behind candidates with stronger citywide name recognition like City Attorney Dennis Herrera or the incumbent, Mayor Ed Lee, who hasn’t accepted public financing and stands to benefit from deep-pocketed backers with ties to big business.

Yet as Assembly Member Tom Ammiano phrased it, “he’s actually given progressives a place to roost. He doesn’t pussy-foot around on the issues that are important,” making him a natural choice for San Francisco voters who care more about stemming the tides of privatization and gentrification than, say, rolling out the red carpet for hi-tech companies.

One of Avalos’ greatest challenges is that he lacks a pile of campaign cash, having received less than $90,000 in contributions as of June 30, according to an Ethics Commission filing. “He can’t call in the big checks,” said Julian Davis, board president of Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, “because he hasn’t been doing the bidding of big business interests.” A roster of financial contributions filed with the Ethics Commission shows that his donor base is comprised mainly of teachers, nonprofit employees, health-care workers, tenant advocates, and other similar groups, with almost no representatives of real-estate development interests or major corporations.

Despite being strapped for cash, he’s collected endorsements ranging from the Democratic County Central Committee, to the Harvey Milk Democratic Club, to the city’s largest labor union, SEIU 1021; he’s also won the backing of quintessential San Francisco characters such as renowned author Rebecca Solnit; San Francisco’s radical bohemian poet laureate, Diane di Prima; and countercultural icon Diamond Dave.

While some of Avalos’ core supporters describe his campaign as “historic,” other longtime political observers have voiced a sort of disenchantment with his candidacy, saying it doesn’t measure up to the sweeping mobilizations that galvanized around Gonzalez or Ammiano. Ammiano has strongly endorsed Avalos, but Gonzalez — who now works for Public Defender (and mayoral candidate) Jeff Adachi — has remained tepid about his candidacy, stating publicly in an interview on Fog City Journal, “I like [Green Party candidate Terrie Baum] and John fine. I just don’t believe in them.”

Ironically, Sup. Sean Elsbernd, often Avalos’ political opposite on board votes, had kinder words for him. “John is intelligent, John is honest, and John has integrity,” Elsbernd told the Guardian. “I don’t think he knows the city well enough to serve as chief executive … but I’ve seen the good work he’s done in his district.”

Meanwhile, Avalos is still grappling with the fallout from the spending cut he initiated against the police and fire departments in 2009. Whereas those unions sent sound trucks rolling through his neighborhood clamoring for his recall from office during that budget fight, the San Francisco Police Officers Association (SFPOA), the San Francisco Fire Fighters union, and the plumbers’ union, Local 38, have teamed up now that Avalos is running for mayor to form an independent expenditure committee targeting him and Public Defender Jeff Adachi, a latecomer to the race.

“We’ll make sure we do everything we can to make sure he never sees Room 200,” SFPOA President Gary Delagnes told the Guardian. “I would spend as much money as I could possibly summon to make sure neither ever takes office.” Delagnes added that he believes the political makeup of San Francisco is shifting in a more moderate direction, to Avalos’ disadvantage. “People spend a lot of money to live here,” he said, “and they don’t want to be walking over 15 homeless people, or having people ask them for money.”

If it’s true that the flanks of the left in San Francisco have already been supplanted with wealthy residents whose primary concern is that they are annoyed by the sight of destitute people, then more has already been lost for the progressive movement than it stands to lose under the scenario of an Avalos defeat.

The great progressive hope?

Despite these looming challenges, the Avalos campaign has amassed a volunteer base that’s more than 1,000 strong, in many cases drawing from grassroots networks already engaged in efforts to defend tenant rights, advance workplace protections for non-union employees, create youth programs that aim to prevent violence in low-income communities, and advance opportunities for immigrants. According to some volunteers, linking these myriad grassroots efforts is part of the point. Aside from the obvious goal of electing Avalos for mayor, his supporters say they hope his campaign will be a force to re-energize and redefine progressive politics in San Francisco.

“All the candidates that are running are trying to appeal to the progressive base,” Avalos said. But what does it really mean? To him, being progressive “is a commitment to a cause that’s greater,” he offered. “It’s about how to alter the relationship of power in San Francisco. My vision of progressivism is more inclusive, and more accountable to real concerns.”

N’Tanya Lee, former executive director of Coleman Advocates, was among the people Avalos consulted when he was considering a run for mayor. “The real progressives in San Francisco are the folks on the ground every day, like the moms working for public schools … everyday families, individual people, often people of color, who are doing the work without fanfare. They are the unsung heroes … and the rising progressive leaders of our city,” she said. “John represents the best of what’s to come. It’s not just about race or class. It’s about people standing for solutions.”

When deciding whether to run, Avalos also turned to his wife, Zapata, who has held leadership positions in the San Francisco teacher’s union in the past. She suggested rounding up community leaders and talking it through. “The campaign needed to be a movement campaign,” Zapata told the Guardian. “John Avalos was not running because he thought John Avalos was the most important person in the world to do this job. Our question was, if John were to do this, how would it help people most affected by economic injustice?”

Hewitt, the executive director of CLAER, also weighed in. “My concern is that he has been painted as a leftist, rooted in some outdated ideology,” she said. “I think [that characterization] is one-dimensional, and I think he’s broader than that. My perception of John is that he’s a pragmatist — rooted in listening, and attempting to respond.”

Others echoed this characterization. “He doesn’t need to be the great progressive hope,” said Rafael Mandelman, an attorney who ran as a progressive in District 8 last year. “If people are looking for the next Matt Gonzalez, I’m not sure that’s what John is about. He’s about the communities he’s representing.”

As to whether or not he has a shot at victory, Mandelman said, “It’s a very wide field, and I think John is going to have a very strong base. I think he will get enough first-choice votes to be one of the top contenders. And with ranked choice voting, anything can happen.”

 

Caught in a RAT trap

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Caught in a RAT trap

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Things are not always as they seem. That’s a lesson Matthew Martinez and Thad Conley learned the hard way — each of them after becoming unwitting targets of San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) sting operations that landed them in San Francisco County Jail, bewildered.

It was early October of 2010, and Martinez had just finished his shift as a chef at a San Francisco restaurant and was headed home when he encountered a man who seemed very intoxicated, near Eighth and Mission streets. The man asked him for a cigarette, so Martinez handed him one.

But then the man gestured to his chest, a move Martinez later explained he interpreted as an invitation to take one of the crumpled dollar bills that was spilling out of the disheveled drunk’s pocket, as payment for the cigarette. Martinez testified in court that he took one dollar, but tucked the other bills safely back into the hapless individual’s pocket.

As soon as Martinez had the bill in his hand, he was surrounded. Not only was the man who’d wanted a cigarette not drunk, he was a police officer. One of eight police officers. The undercover officer gave an arrest signal, and seven cops who had quietly been standing ready closed in, placing the 28-year-old chef under arrest.

 

TAKING THE BAIT

The cops had been staked out on the street for a sting operation as part of SFPD’s Robbery Abatement Team (RAT), a controversial unit that has drawn criticism from the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office for targeting some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods for busts, using cash as bait and sometimes snagging people with no prior criminal records.

Some of the same officers engaged in RAT stings have come under investigation for alleged misconduct in connection with a string of incidents at single room occupancy (SRO) hotels, publicized in a series of surveillance videos aired at press conferences earlier this year by San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi.

“RAT … is used citywide as an effective tool to prevent robberies of innocent victims,” SFPD spokesperson Albie Esparza told the Guardian. “The Police Department uses this operation to catch people that are preying on the vulnerable. The theory is, you catch these people and get them off the street to prevent more robberies or more serious crimes from occurring, thus providing a safer neighborhood. Over 50 percent of the suspects arrested in RAT operations have a history of robbery or theft and a majority are on parole or probation.”

Esparza confirmed that some of the officers have been pulled from RAT duties. “Some of the officers that participated in the RAT operations are not actively working in that capacity due to the SRO/Henry Hotel investigations,” he said, referring to the alleged misconduct cases.

A couple months before Martinez’s ill-fated encounter with the man who he thought wanted to buy a cigarette, Conley was visiting San Francisco from Cincinnati to see friends and attend the Outside Lands music festival when he noticed something strange. Some women had made a show of leaving a car parked, with the doors open and engine still running, in the bus zone near the McDonald’s at Haight and Stanyan streets.

As they climbed into a cab, they spoke as if they were pulling a stunt to get back at a guy. According to Corey Farris, a public defender who represented Conley, he took it upon himself to move the car to a safe place. He first pulled it into the McDonald’s lot, but after someone informed him it would only get towed if he left it there, Farris says, Conley drove the car to a nearby police station.

The car had been placed there by SFPD and KKI Productions, which produces a television show called Bait Car. The whole thing was taped, and in footage obtained by the Guardian that was shot inside a stakeout vehicle where a cop and television producer were monitoring the scene, they can be heard laughing about sexually explicit comments one of them makes about a woman who walks in front of the camera.

At one point, the unidentified undercover officer wonders out loud who would take the bait, saying, “I was kinda hoping the Latin guy would do it.” Later in the video, when Conley comes into view after being apprehended by uniformed officers outside the police station where he’d parked the car, he’s heard explaining to officers that he moved the car because he didn’t want to see it towed.

“I read the police report,” Farris said. “And the police report doesn’t reference any of my client’s statements whatsoever. He says, ‘I’m taking it to the police station.’ That just seems like a big fact to leave out when you’re charging them for stealing the car.”

 

TELLING IT TO THE JUDGE

That dollar Martinez said he thought was meant as payment for a smoke snowballed into an expensive and time-consuming legal problem. He was held in jail for several days, according to his attorney, Prithika Balakrishnan, a public defender.

When Martinez, who is epileptic, asked to retrieve from his backpack the medication he takes to prevent seizures, his request was denied, Balakrishnan said. Unable to access his meds, he asked if he could sleep on a lower bunk in his jail cell in case he had a seizure, and Balakrishnan says that request was denied, too. The San Francisco Sheriff’s Department had not responded to a request for comment by press time.

Martinez’s trial was held in December 2010 and lasted several days. The officer who had been in plainclothes posing as a drunk denied ever motioning to his chest. At the end of the whole fiasco, it took a jury less than 20 minutes to find Martinez not guilty of grand theft. Disgusted, he left San Francisco soon after.

Conley, meanwhile, flew in from Cincinnati almost a year later for his trial date — only to be told upon arrival that his case had been dismissed.

Their cases were particularly bizarre, but Martinez and Conley aren’t the only ones to be targeted by undercover robbery abatement operations. A similar formula is employed in many cases, according to Deputy Public Defender Bob Dunlap, who heads up the office’s Felony Unit. An average of nine officers are staked out along the street, with a decoy officer posing as an easy target.

“He’ll have money crumpled up into balls in his shirt pocket,” Dunlap explains. “He’ll adopt the persona of someone who’s extremely intoxicated.” When someone tries to swipe the loose bills, the offender is immediately arrested. It’s easy to prove that the suspects are guilty. The offenders will have “marked city funds” in their possession — bills that have been photocopied in advance so serial numbers can be matched for evidence.

According to a tally of cases from the Public Defender’s Office, the average amount of money stolen in a RAT sting is $28, and there have been 118 cases filed with the Public Defender’s Office in connection with these undercover operations since 2007. Around 46 percent of all RAT stings take place in the Tenderloin, and 68 percent of the arrestees are black, according to Public Defender statistics. Officers are sometimes paid overtime while conducting RAT operations, and they earn extra pay for court appearances as well.

Just 35 percent of the cases were charged as misdemeanors, and the rest as felonies, according to the tally. “If it’s charged as a robbery, it counts as a strike offense,” points out Matt Gonzalez, chief attorney of the Public Defender’s Office. He’d like to know whether the program will continue under the direction of newly installed Police Chief Greg Suhr, particularly since some of the officers have been pulled from RAT operations in the wake of the SRO scandal, but SFPD has not made any indications that it will reevaluate the practice.

While the busts may be catching criminals who would be taking advantage of vulnerable residents, Gonzalez and Dunlap question the tactic of manufacturing crime, saying it’s an expensive operation that isn’t the best use of public resources. Dunlap likens it to a fishing expedition with an incredibly shallow reach. “They’re creating a different situation than they’re trying to abate,” he says. “There’s something distasteful about going into the poorest neighborhoods and fishing with money.”

Workin’ at the car wash

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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59
Workin’ at the car wash

Worker advocates with La Raza Centro Legal and the San Francisco Day Labor Program are partnering with city officials for a creative approach to addressing the pervasive issue of wage theft: A worker-owned car wash.

On Aug. 17, attorneys from La Raza joined with City Attorney Dennis Herrera to announce that a lawsuit had been filed against the owners of Tower Car Wash for longstanding labor law violations that resulted in workers earning less than minimum wage. The complaint, filed jointly with the city and La Raza, seeks to recover up to $3 million in compensation, penalties, and interest for the cheated workers.

The Tower Car Wash lawsuit, along with other high-profile complaints alleging wage theft that the city has filed against the owners of Dick Lee Pastry and Danny Ho, who allegedly cheated day laborers out of the money they were owed, would never have come to fruition if low-wage workers hadn’t come forward. Individuals like Tower Car Wash employee Rosa Ochoa, who’s involved with La Raza’s Colectiva de Mujeres, have publicly challenged their employers for labor violations, a tough stand in a state with exceptionally high unemployment in the midst of a recession.

“What we feel like is really important about this lawsuit is that for us, it’s about worker empowerment,” says Workers’ Rights Coordinating Attorney Kate Hegé of La Raza. “It wouldn’t be possible without these workers being able to come forward.”

The idea for a worker-owned car wash emerged out of a desire to advance the goal of worker empowerment, Hegé notes. With help from Sup. David Campos, interim Mayor Ed Lee, and pro bono assistance from the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, La Raza and the San Francisco Day Labor Program hope to establish a regular car wash on weekdays in the city-owned lot on Bayshore and Alemany boulevards, the location of the Alemany Farmer’s Market and the Alemany Flea Market on Saturdays and Sundays.

“We’ve been working with the city for the past several months to start a green, worker-owned car wash cooperative where workers of the San Francisco Day Labor Program would not only administer it, but work and gain benefits,” Renee Saucedo, Community Empowerment Coordinator at La Raza, told the Guardian. “The main thing about this day labor car wash is that it’s going to be run by the workers themselves.”

The project comes on the heels of a broader local effort to improve protections for low-wage workers. Earlier this month, the Board of Supervisors approved the Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance, crafted in partnership with the Progressive Workers Alliance to strengthen the the city’s Office of Labor Standards & Enforcement.

Inside the V.I.P. cocktail party with Willie Brown

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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10

The Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth hosted a V.I.P. reception just before a mayoral candidate forum held at UCSF Aug. 16, and former Mayor Willie Brown appeared to be the guest of honor. Although the theme of the event was technically “honoring San Francisco’s mayors” — former Mayor Frank Jordan was there, someone indicated that former Mayor Art Agnos was in the room, former Mayor Gavin Newsom was invited but didn’t show, and Mayor Ed Lee was of course in attendence — Brown seemed to be given more prominent recognition than any of the others.

The moment he strolled in, Sup. Mark Farrell, who was doing introductions for the the affair, scrambled onstage to announce Brown’s presence and deliver a warm welcome, and everyone applauded. Within minutes, the former mayor was seen chatting with a crowd that included Mayor Lee and several others. Soon after, Brown and former Mayor Frank Jordan were summoned to the stage to say a few words.

Once in the limelight, Brown cracked a few jokes. He said he felt for the 36 mayoral candidates, who are forced to campaign in an era when the Internet threatens to reveal videos and photos of them at any time to thousands of online viewers. “I’m glad they didn’t have that kind of communication system when I was running,” he said. “I can’t imagine the photographs you’d have of me floating around doing things I shouldn’t have been doing.”

As for his own time in Room 200, “I enjoyed every single solitary minute of it, and if I really thought I had great skills, I would be number 37,” he said, drawing more applause.

Then again, common wisdom says it isn’t necessary for Brown to bother campaigning in order to gain access to Room 200 these days. Later that same evening, during his own turn in the spotlight at the mayoral debate, Mayor Lee came under fire from Board President David Chiu, who revealed that Lee had privately confided to him about a week before he announced his candidacy that he was having a difficult time saying no to Brown and influential Chinatown business consultant Rose Pak when it came to launching a campaign for a full term.

Chiu’s pointed question for the mayor was what had changed in his mind since that conversation, but Lee referenced neither Brown nor Pak in his answer. Instead, he said he’d changed his mind after witnessing his success in changing the tone of government and getting things done in City Hall.

Back at the V.I.P. reception, Brown and Jordan were invited onstage again, this time to receive awards presented by the Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth. But first Steve Falk, president and CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, reminded the crowd that there was still time to buy a drink before the debate got underway. He said, “Debates are much more interesting after three drinks.”

Before Falk presented Brown with a commemorative plaque, he said, “It’s tough to put in a few sentences the life and times of Willie Brown,” and proceeded to note that, with his term in the California Assembly and time serving as mayor of San Francisco behind him, Brown “has now followed his friend Herb Caen into an honest line of work as a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.”

Being a newspaper columnist doesn’t mean Brown is always kind to members of the local media. While mixing through the crowd minutes after receiving his award, he fired some harsh words at a well-known City Hall reporter who had recently published some unflattering articles about the “Run, Ed, Run” effort to encourage Lee to seek a full term.

In recent months, Brown’s columns have provided the public at large with a rare glimpse into Mayor Lee’s dining experiences in San Francisco. In February, Brown wrote in one of his columns that he went out to North Beach Restaurant at sat at the window table with Lee, Brown’s “friend” Sonya Molodetskaya, and Jack Baylis, who serves as the US Group Executive of Strategic Development for AECOM, one of the city’s largest contractors and a sponsor of the Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth Event. (Baylis was on the invite list for the V.I.P reception, too.)

Apparently, AECOM had something to celebrate that same day — according to an Aug. 16 press release, an AECOM joint venture was just awarded a $150 million contract for program management services for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s wastewater improvement program.

The V.I.P. reception had representation from many key players in the downtown business community, with sponsorship from AT&T, AECOM, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., Wells Fargo, Motorola, California Pacific Medical Center, the San Francsico Chamber of Commerce, the Building Owners and Managers Association, the San Francisco Police Officer’s Association, Shorenstein Properties, and others. Several labor unions, including the United Association of Plumbers & Pipefitters Union Local 38, United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America Local Union No. 22, and United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 5 were also listed as sponsors. Guests included district supervisors, developers, lobbyists, business owners, mayoral candidates, media spokespeople, executives from the health care industry, and other political insiders.

Clearly, there were many people in the room who wanted to get on Brown’s good side.

So much for civility

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
So much for civility

rebeccab@sfbg.com

The San Francisco mayor’s race went from a lackluster affair to a dynamic match as the Aug. 12 filing deadline drew near and two prominent city officials who had previously said they wouldn’t run tossed their hats into the ring.

Mayor Ed Lee’s Aug. 8 announcement that he’d seek a full term prompted several of his opponents to use their time onstage at candidate forums to decry his reversal and question his ties to the moneyed, influential backers who openly urged him to run. Several days later, Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s last-minute decision to run for mayor signaled more tension yet to come in the debates.

At this point, eight current city officials are running campaigns for higher office, and the dialogue is beginning to take on a tone that is distinctly more biting than civil. Adachi, who had not yet debated onstage with his opponents by press time, told reporters he was running because he wanted “to make sure there’s a voice in there that’s talking about the fiscal realities of the city.”

Adachi authored a pension reform ballot measure that rivals the package crafted by Lee, labor unions, and business interests (see “Awaiting consensus,” May 31, 2011). At an Aug. 11 candidate forum hosted by the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, the San Francisco Young Democrats, and the City Democratic Club, all of the top-tier candidates who were present indicated that they would support Lee’s pension reform measure and not Adachi’s.

“The reforms that I have championed are reforms that are absolutely needed, along with action,” Adachi told reporters moments after making his candidacy official. He added that after watching the mayoral debates, “I became convinced that either the candidates don’t get it, or they don’t want to get it.”

Those fighting words will likely spur heated exchanges in the months to come, but until Adachi’s entrance into the race, it was Lee who took the most lumps from opponents. Even Board President David Chiu, a mayoral candidate whose campaign platform is centered on the idea that he’s helped restore civility to local government, had some harsh words for Lee during an Aug. 11 mayoral debate.

“I do regret my decision to take Ed Lee at his word when he said he would not run,” Chiu said in response to a question about whether he regretted any of his votes. He also said his first interaction with Lee after the mayor had announced his candidacy was “a little like meeting an ex-girlfriend after a breakup.”

Lee, whose pitch on the campaign trail features a remarkably similar narrative about transcending political squabbling in City Hall, became the target of boos, hisses, and noisemaker blasts when a boisterous crowd packed the Castro Theater for an Aug. 8 candidate forum. He received one of the most forceful rebukes from Sen. Leland Yee, an opponent whom Lee supporters are especially focused on defeating.

“Had the mayor said that he would in fact run, he may not have gotten the votes for interim mayor,” Yee said. “Will you resign from your post,” he asked, challenging Lee, “in order to then run for mayor?” Days later, Yee had developed a new mantra about throwing power brokers out of City Hall instead of “wining and dining with them.”

Yet Lee said his decision to enter the race wasn’t because of the push from his backers, but because of how well things have gone during his brief tenure in Room 200. “Things have changed at City Hall, particularly in the last seven months,” he told reporters Aug. 8. “And because of that change, I changed my mind.”

In yet another twist, former Mayor Art Agnos — whom progressives had looked to as a potential appointee to the vacant mayor’s seat back in December, before Lee was voted in to replace former mayor and Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom — delivered a surprise endorsement of City Attorney Dennis Herrera shortly after Lee declared. The decision was particularly significant since Agnos first hired Lee to serve in city government, and has a long history of working with him.

“[Herrera] is an independent person who will empower neighborhoods … and won’t be beholden to power brokers,” Agnos said. He also told the Guardian he wasn’t surprised that Lee had opted to run, given the role former Mayor Willie Brown and influential business consultant Rose Pak had played in orchestrating Lee’s appointment.

“Anybody who is an astute political observer saw the signs from the very beginning,” Agnos said. In response to a comment about his unique vantage point as a would-be caretaker mayor, he said, “I would’ve kept my word and not run for reelection.”

Intense focus on Lee’s flip-flop, and on the Progress for All-backed “Run, Ed, Run” effort that was the subject of an Ethics Commission discussion that same week, stemmed at least in part from the threat the incumbent mayor represents to other candidates. A CBS 5-SurveyUSA poll suggested he became an instant front-runner.

Yet questions about “Run, Ed, Run” — some raised by observers unaffiliated with any campaigns — also served to spotlight the candidate’s longstanding ties with backers closely connected to powerful business interests that stand to lose big if their links to city government aren’t preserved.

Retired Judge Quentin Kopp issued an open letter to District Attorney George Gascón Aug. 1 urging him to convene a criminal grand jury to investigate whether illegal and corrupt influencing had occurred when Pak — a close friend of Lee’s and a key driver behind the “Run, Ed, Run” effort — reportedly recruited executives of Recology to gather signatures urging Lee to run.

Recology, which handles the city’s waste, was recently awarded a $112 million city contract, and Lee’s scoring of the company and recommendation to raise rates in his previous capacity as city administrator benefited the company. Brown received substantial campaign donations from Recology in previous bids for mayor. Kopp is the coauthor of a ballot initiative asking San Francisco voters if the company’s monopoly on city garbage contracts should be put out to bid.

“A criminal grand jury is vital in order to put people under oath and interrogate them,” Kopp said. “They would put Willie Brown under oath, put Pak under oath, put [Recology President Mike Sangiacomo] under oath, put [Recology spokesperson Sam Singer] under oath … That’s the course of action that should be pursued by this.”

Although Kopp told the Guardian that he hadn’t yet received a response from Gascón, DA candidates Sharmin Bock, Bill Fazio, and David Onek nevertheless seized the opportunity to publicly and jointly call for Gascón to recuse himself from any investigation into Progress for All. Gascón has a conflict of interest, they argued, since he reportedly sought Pak’s advice when deciding whether to accept Newsom’s offer to switch from his previous post as police chief to his current job as top prosecutor.

The Ethics Commission determined unanimously Aug. 8 that the activities of Progress for All, the committee that was formed to encourage Lee to run, had not run afoul of election laws despite director John St. Croix’s opinion that it had filed improperly as a general purpose committee when it ought to have been a candidate committee, which would have placed caps on contribution limits.

“The Ethics Commission has spoken, and they’ve supported our position,” Progress for All consultant Enrique Pearce of Left Coast Communications told the Guardian.

St. Croix did not return Guardian calls seeking comment, but an Ethics Commission press release included a caveat: “Should facts surface that coordination occurred between Mayor Lee and [Progress for All], such allegations will be investigated under the Commission’s enforcement regulations.”

At a Lee support rally organized by his official campaign team on Aug. 11, volunteers who arrived with “Run, Ed, Run” materials produced by Progress for All were told they could not display those signs and T-shirts; the same people were on a first-name basis with one of Lee’s campaign team members.

Pressed on the question of whether there was any coordination between agents of Progress for All and Lee, Pearce said the Ethics Commission discussion had focused on whether Lee had been a candidate. “Whether or not he’s a candidate has nothing to do with whether or not he has dinner with Rose [Pak],” Pearce noted. He insisted that there had not been coordination, and that the efforts to encourage Lee to run and to support Lee as a candidate were totally separate.

Sup. John Avalos, who is running for mayor on a progressive platform, recalled at an Aug. 8 candidate forum how things unfolded when Lee’s name first came up as an appointee for interim mayor.

Avalos reminded people that he had called for postponing the vote back in December because he hadn’t even had a chance to sit down and meet with Lee, who was in Hong Kong at the time. With behind-the-scenes deals orchestrating his appointment, Avalos said, “We saw City Hall turning into one big back room.”

Advocates aim to change youth sentencing of life without parole

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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8
Advocates aim to change youth sentencing of life without parole

Christian Bracamontes was 16 years old and had never been in trouble with the law when he made a decision that landed him in a California prison, serving out a sentence of life without parole.

He was part of a tagging crew, and he and a friend had gone down to a wash to hang out and do graffiti. When his friend showed him that he had a gun in his bag, he was surprised. A group of kids came down to the wash and offered to sell them weed, but they refused. Then his friend got an idea. 

“He said to me, do you want to rob them? I said, ‘I don’t care,'” Bracamontes told an interviewer with Human Rights Watch years later. He trailed behind his friend as he approached the kid who’d offered to sell them drugs, but things did not go as planned: The victim threatened to kill them. Bracamontes figured the bluff had been called, and he turned to get his bike so they could leave. But then his friend fired the gun.

Bracamontes was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. The prosecutor offered a lower sentence of 16-to-life if he accepted a plea deal, but he refused, since he could not fathom how he could possibly be found guilty when he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.

His story was one of many profiles included in a Human Rights Watch report titled, “When I Die, They’ll Send Me Home,” an in-depth analysis of California youth serving life sentences without parole. According to that 2008 study, an estimated 45 percent of youth offenders serving that sentence were convicted of murder, but didn’t physically pull the trigger. The convictions reflect a California law that holds youth responsible for a murder that occurs when they were part of a felony, even if they didn’t plan for it to happen. In nearly 70 percent of the cases surveyed by Human Rights Watch, youth didn’t act alone in their crimes, and at least one codefendant was an adult.

A broad statewide coalition of youth advocates and human rights organizations is now pushing for legislation that they hope will give youth in these circumstances a second chance to turn their lives around. Senate Bill 9, dubbed California Fair Sentencing for Youth, would make it possible for youth serving life without parole to petition for a court to review their case and determine whether to impose a lower sentence.

The legislation would permit up to three hearings after 15, 20, and 25 years of incarceration, and the minimum time that someone would have to serve before they could be granted parole is 25 years. Only inmates who exhibit signs of rehabilitation and remorse would be able to submit a petition for a case review. If resentenced, the offenders would still have to go before a parole board to prove that they deserve to be placed on parole.

According to Human Rights Watch, international human rights law prohibits life without parole for youth — and the United States is the only country that imposes this sentence in practice, though other countries have laws on the books permitting it.
 
“All of the organizations and literally thousands of individuals come to this with the idea that this extreme sentence is not a sentence we should be imposing on people who are under the age of 18,” Elizabeth Calvin of Human Rights Watch told the Guardian. Since Human Rights Watch released its national and statewide studies of the issue in 2005 and 2008, she said, “There’s more awareness nationally that our juvenile justice policies of lock them up and throw away the key are failing. It really is worthwhile to give young people a second chance.” Dozens of human rights, civil liberties, and faith-based organizations have pushed to pass the bill, with efforts beginning several years ago.

In California, roughly 300 people who were sentenced when they were minors are serving sentences of life without parole, representing around 12 percent of the estimated 2,500 incarerated individuals in the nation who serving out the same sentence.

Calvin described the bill as legislation that “balances the needs and interests of victim family members who believe that there are some cases that deserve life without parole.” She noted that the bill faced strong opposition from law enforcement and groups of victim family members, though certain individuals in those same communities have voiced support for SB 9. “We’re hopeful, but it’s definitely an uphill battle,” she said.

The Assembly Appropriations Committee will vote on SB 9 on Aug. 17, and if it clears that hurdle, it will go onto the full Assembly. The bill was authored by Sen. Leland Yee, with principal coauthors Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and Juan Vargas (D-Chula Vista), and co-authors Assemblymembers Felipe Fuentes (D-Arleta) and Bonnie Lowenthal (D-Long Beach).

“SB 9 is not a get-out-of-jail-free card; it is an incredibly modest proposal that respects victims, international law, and the fact that children have a greater capacity for rehabilitation than adults,” said Yee, who is also a child psychologist and a candidate for mayor. Research has shown that brain maturation continues throughout adolescence, so young people’s abilities to plan, make decisions, and think critically are not yet fully developed.

“It’s a pretty modest bill,” says Sue Burrell, a staff attorney with the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center. “It’s a pretty intense process even to get a hearing, and to be in a position where you could be released.”

She added that her organization has been engaged in similar work for years. “We’ve been very concerned about the adultification of kids,” she said. “You can’t decide when someone’s so young that … they could never move beyond this phase of their lives.” Many of the cases that land youth in prison without parole are similar, Burell said. “The classic scenario is, they’ll go out and do some low-level thing … but then it turns out that one of the buddies has a knife or a gun. And the rest is history.”

It’s official: Adachi’s in the race (VIDEO)

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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117

Public Defender Jeff Adachi filed to run for mayor of San Francisco on Aug. 12, the last possible day to enter the race.  Adachi said he’d decided to run in order to “make sure there’s a voice in there that’s talking about the fiscal realities of our city.”

At a mayoral candidate forum Aug. 11, every single contender — Mayor Ed Lee, Sup. John Avalos, venture capitalist Joanna Rees, Assessor Recorder Phil Ting, Board President David Chiu, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, former Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, former Sup. Bevan Dufty, and Sen. Leland Yee — said they would support the pension reform package that was placed on the ballot after discussion with labor unions, the mayor’s office, and business interests, and not the pension reform measure authored by Adachi.

Here’s a video of Adachi explaining his decision to members of the press moments after filling out the paperwork.

Video by Rebecca Bowe

Environmentalists: America’s Cup not green enough

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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9

A preliminary planning document for the America’s Cup doesn’t go far enough to protect San Francisco’s natural environment, a coalition of environmental organizations has said.

The Environmental Council — made up of a group of nonprofits including the Sierra Club, San Francisco Baykeeper, Turtle Island Restoration Network, the Dolphin Swimming and Boating Club, and others closely tracking planning for the America’s Cup — were gearing up to offer feedback to the San Francisco Planning Commission Aug. 11 on a hefty draft environmental impact review (DEIR) of the prestigious yachting event’s impacts on marine life, air quality, and parklands.

The draft EIR “does not go far enough to protect San Francisco’s air, water, and marine life,” said Teri Shore of the Turtle Island Restoration Network. She advocated for requiring vessels to use the cleanest possible fuels and to travel at slow speeds so as not to collide with dolphins, porpoises, seals, sea lions, or whales once outside the Golden Gate.

Ken Coren, Vice President of the Dolphin and Swimming Club, voiced concerns about the effects the race would have on swimming and recreational boating. “The bay would be sealed off — it would only be spectator viewing,” he said. Activities like swimming around Aquatic Park or entering the bay on rowboats “would be prevented if you were going to take the EIR as it stands today at its word.”

Jon Golinger, president of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, said the report “dramatically underestimates the impact” to individual San Francisco neighborhoods.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BngNbTCUcM8
Jon Golinger speaks at a press conference on the steps of City Hall. Video by Rebecca Bowe

Jennifer Clary, of San Francisco Tomorrow, said the groups’ concerns centered on three key areas: Impacts to the water, such as the potential for oil spills or degraded water quality; impacts that huge crowds would have on surrounding lands, especially in protected areas such as the Presidio; and neighborhood impacts. “You have already busy locations, and they’re going to packing more people in,” she said.

While they raised concerns, the nonprofit representatives also made it clear that they were not opposed to the America’s Cup, and only wanted to see the city strengthen environmental protections during the event. David Anderson, Conservation Committee Chair with the Golden Gate Audubon Society, noted that the world-famous regatta would result in a major economic boon. “Certainly the city can afford some mitigation to make it right,” he said.

Shelter from the storm

Andrew Lam
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0
Shelter from the storm

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Ms. Li has a petite build, but she’s physically strong. Hauling around dish bins and boxes of produce weighing 50 pounds was part of her daily routine when she worked shifts lasting 12 hours a day, six days a week, at a San Francisco Chinatown eatery that later made headlines for its poor labor standards.

Li, who did not share her full name for fear of retaliation, says things have improved slightly since the days she worked at King Tin Restaurant, which closed its doors abruptly in 2004 after workers who hadn’t seen paychecks in months filed an onslaught of complaints. At the time, her husband was unemployed and she was struggling to support her two teenagers on a single paycheck totaling $950 a month.

It took about five years before the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (OLSE), the City Attorney’s Office, and grassroots advocates with the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) finally succeeded in forcing the restaurant’s previous owner to grant Li and other workers the back wages they were owed.

Now, she’s working 12 hour shifts, five days a week at a different restaurant, but says she still isn’t receiving minimum wage or overtime pay. Li aided in the efforts of the Progressive Workers Alliance (PWA) to urge members of the Board of Supervisors to pass the Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance, which aims to strengthen enforcement of local labor standards by empowering OLSE to take a more proactive role against employers who don’t pay workers what they’re owed.

As a kitchen worker at a high-end restaurant in downtown San Francisco, Li receives a monthly paycheck totaling a little more than $1,400 before taxes. Take-home pay is less, because the employer deducts for meals, a requirement that cannot be dodged even if employees bring their own food.

Li told the Guardian her coworkers are angry about the working conditions, but fear of job loss keeps them silent. “Some of my coworkers work so hard that they cry,” she said, speaking through a translator. “One worker was burned badly in the kitchen, and didn’t receive worker’s compensation or paid sick leave.” That person uses their own ointment to treat the burns, she added.

As she described her predicament at the CPA office in Chinatown, student volunteers were creating a banner to be displayed during a press event at City Hall. They arranged folded red and yellow petitions signed by workers in similar situations to spell out PWA, for Progressive Worker’s Alliance, to urge city officials to crack down on employers who violate local labor laws.

PWA has been meeting regularly since last year, but the organizations that are part of the advocacy group have been engaged in organizing low-wage workers for much longer. Over the course of more than three years, CPA interviewed hundreds of restaurant workers in Chinatown, and their surveys revealed that about half were not receiving San Francisco’s minimum wage, while about 75 percent weren’t being paid overtime when they worked more than 40 hours a week. Yet the problem of wage theft in San Francisco extends well beyond Chinatown.

PWA includes representatives from CPA, the Filipino Community Center, Young Workers United, People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), the San Francisco Day Labor Program, and Pride at Work, among others. On August 2, workers and organizers with PWA burst into thunderous applause after the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to pass the Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance on first reading. This represented a major victory.

“With the economic crisis, and the backlash against workers, we felt that as a small grassroots organization, we needed to have a more powerful voice and a specific space for worker issues to be brought to light,” CPA lead organizer Shaw San Liu said of the impetus behind PWA.

“You’re talking about workers who are pretty vulnerable — not knowing the laws, not speaking the language. People who need a job and cannot afford to lose it are vulnerable to exploitation,” Liu said.

While labor laws in San Francisco are uniquely strong, with mandatory paid sick leave and local minimum wage established at $9.92 per hour, “When it comes to implementation and enforcement, there’s still a lot left to be desired,” Liu said. As things stand, investigation of employer violations are predicated on worker complaints, and it can take years for a worker to get a hearing if they’re owed back wages.

The Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance doubles the fines for employers who retaliate against workers who file complaints. It allows OLSE investigators to issue immediate citations if they detect a problem in a workplace. When an employer comes under investigation, it requires them to post a notice informing workers that they have a right to cooperate with investigators — and imposes a fine for failing to post the notice. It also establishes a one-year timeline in which cases brought to OSLE’s attention must be resolved.

Under the new law, employers would also be required to provide contact information to their workers, an important change for day laborers who are sometimes taken to job sites where they perform manual labor, only to be dropped off later without payment and no way to get in touch with their temporary bosses.

“You have raised awareness about the crisis of wage theft,” OLSE director Donna Levitt told workers at an Aug. 2 rally outside City Hall. “And we have made it clear that wage theft will not be tolerated in our city.”

The ordinance was spearheaded by Sups. David Campos and Eric Mar, with Sups. Jane Kim, John Avalos, Ross Mirkarimi, and Board President David Chiu signing on as co-sponsors. Members of PWA met with supervisors to win their support, and even succeeded in bringing on board the influential Golden Gate Restaurant Association.

“The fact is that even though we have minimum wage laws in place, those laws are still being violated not only throughout the country, but here in San Francisco,” Campos told the Guardian. “Wage theft is a crime, and we need to make sure that there is adequate enforcement — and that requires a change in the law so that we provide [OLSE] more tools and more power to make sure that the rights of workers are protected.”

Victoria Aquino, 66, spent several years working 16-hour hours without minimum wage or overtime pay as the sole live-in caregiver for six disabled patients at a San Francisco care center. Her duties included feeding patients, bathing them, changing diapers, and cleaning.

“The patients would knock to wake me up and ask me for cigarettes or food in the middle of the night,” she recounted, “and I wasn’t paid for that.” She first complained to OLSE after one of the patients physically attacked her, leaving her black and blue with a permanently injured finger, and later sought the help of the Filipino Community Center to file a claim demanding back wages. It took months, but her employer eventually settled, agreeing to pay $60,000 in back wages and reduce her shifts to eight hours a day.

Aquino said she became involved with the Filipino Community Center because “there are a lot of caregivers still suffering, and more than I suffered — especially those who don’t know the laws. I sympathize for them. It hurts me when I hear some caregivers who are no longer supposed to work. They’re past their 70s, and they’re still working.”

Ecological rewind

Andrew Lam
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25
Ecological rewind

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Follow the trail from Yosemite National Park’s Rancheria Falls up along dusty switchbacks and down through a canopy of pines and madrones for roughly three miles, and you will reach Tiltill Valley.

Accessible only to hikers and horseback riders, the backwoods meadow hums with the chatter of birds, bees, and the distant rush of water spilling over rocks. Butterflies dart among wild orchids, lilies, yarrow, and other kinds of flowering plants that thrive there, and a lone sequoia stands along the perimeter. The valley floor is lush and boggy, with the forested hills of the High Sierra as its backdrop.

Tiltill Valley is a real-life example of what Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley might look like if the reservoir that holds San Francisco’s water supply were drained and the terrain allowed to return to its natural state, according to Mike Marshall, executive director of Restore Hetch Hetchy.

His nonprofit group has a singular mission, as the title suggests. The upbeat, 50-year-old former political consultant wants to place a charter amendment on the November 2012 ballot to ask San Francisco voters if Hetch Hetchy Reservoir should be drained so that the valley, which has been underwater since 1923, can be ecologically restored and turned into an attraction for park visitors.

Yet that simply stated goal belies an extraordinarily difficult and expensive task, one that would fundamentally alter San Francisco’s water delivery system and diminish a city-owned source of inexpensive, green energy.

“The destruction of Hetch Hetchy Valley in the 1920s was the worst environmental disaster to ever besiege the national park system,” Marshall says. “And today, it is completely out of whack with the values of the vast majority of people who live here.”

But most city officials think this idea is just plain crazy. Whether or not it was a good idea to build the dam originally, they say it’s unwise and unrealistic to spend scarce resources to destroy one of city’s most valuable assets.

“While it is an interesting idea, I don’t think that there is yet a credible plan to move forward and actually restore Hetch Hetchy that will ensure that within our budget, we’ll be able to get the water that 2.5 million Bay Area customers need, as well as do everything else that the current Hetch Hetchy system does,” Board President David Chiu told the Guardian.

Based in San Francisco, Restore Hetch Hetchy worked in tandem with the Environmental Defense Fund and a consulting firm to craft a technical analysis describing how the city could continue receiving reliable freshwater deliveries without the reservoir, although it would require filtration because of its lower quality and be less abundant in drought years.

While restoring the valley would be an ecological win in a perfect world, cost estimates range in the billions of dollars at a time when budgets are shrinking and economic turbulence rocks the public and private sectors.

Draining Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and replacing it with other water and power projects would punch holes in an already cash-strapped city budget, first with the high capital costs and then with higher long-term annual costs. The hydro-electric system provides carbon-free electricity to city agencies at basement rates and helps fund local renewable-energy projects, so relinquishing some of that generation capacity would be a step backward when it comes to addressing climate change.

“The loss of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir would fly in the face of every effort San Francisco has made to replace fossil-fuel power generation with renewable energy sources,” City Attorney Dennis Herrera wrote in a 2004 editorial in the Guardian. Losing hydropower from the dam, he wrote, “would force greater dependence on fossil-fuel electricity and impair low-cost hydropower with higher-cost renewables, making San Francisco’s efforts to create a sustainable energy future virtually impractical. And it would devastate our efforts to enact a public power system in San Francisco. Hetch Hetchy was built by people who envisioned a public power system to serve all of San Francisco. We should finish that system before we start tearing it down.”

But when a round of invitations went out to Bay Area journalists to join a three-day backpacking trip in Yosemite and learn about Restore Hetch Hetchy’s vision, I signed up to attend. After all, here was a chance to go backpacking in beautiful terrain and assess one of the most controversial and impactful proposals facing San Francisco.

 

WATER

Our first stop within park boundaries was a chocolate-colored chalet with a spacious deck overlooking the waterfront. Owned by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), it’s notorious in San Francisco politics as a weekend getaway for local elected officials, city commissioners, and favored staffers. Stories of the chalet abound, as it’s rumored to have been the site of private soirees for powerful players and a rendezvous for lovers in extramarital affairs.

The eight-mile long, 300-foot deep Hetch Hetchy Reservoir holds 360,000 acre-feet of water, and the dam itself is an impressive structure, although Marshall scoffs at the popular wisdom casting it as “a marvel of engineering,” and dryly quips, “so was the Titanic.”

Native American remains were buried underwater when it was built, Marshall told us as we peered out over the towering dam wall, and 67 lives were lost during construction. As we rounded the perimeter of the man-made water body, sweating in the summer heat and saddled with gear, he asked us to imagine peering down into a dramatic sloping valley instead of what it looks like in its current state, which is a lake.

“Don’t call it a lake,” he insisted. Restore Hetch Hetchy regards the reservoir as an unnatural blemish that should never have been imposed upon a scenic and biodiverse environment in a national park. According to Mark Cedorborg, an ecological restoration expert with Hanford ARC and a Restore Hetch Hetchy board member who joined the trip, it wouldn’t take long for the natural ecosystem to bounce back if the water were removed, recreating a rare wildlife habitat that would mirror Yosemite Valley.

Sierra Club founding president John Muir would have sided with them, of course. The famous ecologist wrote passionately about the valley and vehemently fought the effort to submerge it. At the time, a chorus of opposition arose against flooding Hetch Hetchy — and that was before modern science documenting the impacts dams have wrought on the environment.

A black-and-white image of Michael O’Shaughnessy, the civil engineer behind the project, is posted on an info kiosk beside the dam, his eyebrows arched in a wizard-like, calculating gaze as he uses a pointer to mark the spot on a map of San Francisco’s watershed.

As things stand today, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir is a crucial storage facility for drinking water. Freshwater flowing from the Tuolumne River through the glacial formation accounts for 85 percent of SFPUC deliveries to about 2.5 million customers in the city and on the peninsula.

Hetch Hetchy is unique in that it’s just one of a handful of water systems nationwide that uses chemical treatment and ultraviolet disinfection, but no filtration, to purify fresh water that is transported along a gravity-fed system down to the city.

SFPUC spokesperson Tyrone Jue said Hetch Hetchy water does not require filtration “because basically, it’s a giant granite basin there in the reservoir, so there’s no sedimentation.” He added that the water quality is exceptionally high. “It’s high up in the watershed. The higher up in the watershed, the better it is.”

Restore Hetch Hetchy has submitted a number of proposals to ensure that San Francisco could still receive adequate supplies without the reservoir, including constructing a new intertie at Don Pedro Reservoir, which lies downstream from Hetch Hetchy, to get drinking water supplies from there instead.

Under this scenario, the SFPUC would continue to get its water from the Tuolumne River — but it would have to build a new filtration system to treat it because the water quality would be worse and the city would lose its federal waiver.

That’s an expensive consideration, particularly at a time when city coffers are depleted, critical services for vulnerable populations have been gutted, and taxpayers are wary of authorizing costly new endeavors.

Marshall defends the cost by asserting that the current system is flawed; the lack of filtration makes San Francisco’s water more susceptible to contamination from nasty microorganisms like cryptosporidium and giardia, he says.

“San Francisco has a unique health demographic in that over 5 percent of the people that live in the city have compromised immune systems, if you just look at people who are HIV positive,” he said. “Ultimately, San Francisco is going to be forced to filter its water, so why are we kicking this can down the road?”

But filtering water at the residential level would be far cheaper than tearing down the dam. Jue pegs the cost of a new filtration system at somewhere between $3 billion and $10 billion, but Marshall rejects that estimate as “just crazy.”

So we called Xavier Irias, director of engineering at the East Bay Municipal Utility District. “Ten looks a little high, but the three sounds very credible,” Irias said, acknowledging that there were many complicating factors that could affect cost. Ultimately, he said, the cost range could be anywhere from half a billion to the single-digit billions of dollars.

“With the filtration costs, not only are you talking about building a facility to filter the water, you’re now talking about increased power consumption to basically power those filtration plants,” Jue noted. “You’d have to start pumping water, which would require additional energy. And then on top of that, there’s the long-term operation.”

What’s more is that the quantity of water that San Francisco now depends on wouldn’t be guaranteed every year. According to an analysis done in partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund, reconfiguring the system to tap Don Pedro would result in 19 percent less water delivered from the Tuolumne in critically dry years, and similar losses would result from alternative proposals like tapping Cherry Reservoir, another storage facility in the SFPUC system.

Restore Hetch Hetchy has suggested that the shortfall could be made up in part with new water-conservation measures, something that cities arguably ought to be practicing anyhow since climate change threatens to bring about drier conditions in California’s watershed. It could also place the city in the position of having to go to the open market to purchase water for customers — just as dwindling water supplies raise the temperature between cities and counties scrambling to secure reliable deliveries.

“The Hetch Hetchy water system is a fully owned public asset,” Jue notes. “At a time when state and federal governments are struggling with even being able to close our budget deficits, to even look at dismantling an environmentally sound, cost-efficient water system that delivers water to 2.5 million people is sort of outrageous.”

 

POWER

In addition to capturing the flow of pristine Tuolumne River water that eventually makes its way into the city’s plumbing network, O’Shaughnessy Dam is a key component of the SFPUC-owned hydro-electric system, which produced 1.7 billion kilowatt hours of power last year with no greenhouse gas emissions.

If efforts to advance the cause of a public power system resurfaced in San Francisco, having the full capacity of the Hetch Hetchy hydro-electric generation in place would be vital. Juice for city streetlights, Muni’s light rail cars, the chandeliers adorning the Board Chambers in City Hall, and countless other municipal uses are derived from this gravity-fed system, which provides roughly one-fifth of San Francisco’s overall energy needs.

City departments pay three or four cents per kilowatt-hour, less than what it costs to generate the power. If all the hydro-electric power were eliminated and substituted with PG&E power, the city would get pinned with $32 million in additional costs annually, and its carbon footprint would expand by more than 900 million pounds of greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the SFPUC. However, a technical report produced by the Environmental Defense Fund suggests the city would only suffer a 20 percent decline in the hydro-electric output, since operations at other SFPUC reservoirs would continue.

The hydro-electric system also generates revenue through the sale of excess power to Turlock and Modesto irrigation districts, but that would come to an end if the generation capacity fell by 20 percent. Restore Hetch Hetchy estimates this loss to be around $10 million annually.

“Whenever we sell the power to Modesto and Turlock, that revenue then goes to fund programs like GoSolarSF, and all of our energy-efficiency retrofits of municipal facilities,” Jue explains. If the city lost its ability to sell off this excess supply, “We would no longer be getting power revenue at all, which we’re using to help fund community choice aggregation.”

Fraught with problems as it is, the city’s effort to launch a community choice aggregation program offering residential customers an alternative to PG&E nevertheless holds promise as a powerful green shift for a major metropolitan hub. For all the ecological benefits to Yosemite, restoring Hetch Hetchy could wind up undercutting the fledgling green power initiative, and the upshot would be a boon for PG&E. Coupled with the fact that ceding control of the valley back to the National Park Service could strip the city of its mandate for public power, the utility giant would benefit tremendously from this plan.

All of this makes it somewhat surprising that District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a longtime champion of the cause of public power, appointed Marshall to serve on the SFPUC Citizens Advisory Committee, a move that rankled SFPUC staff.

“I’ve known Mike many years and have found him to be whip smart when it comes to complicated policy issues,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian when asked about this. “He knows that I am an unwavering supporter for public power and that I’d hope his advocacy on the SFPUC continues to advance and innovate our locally-driven clean energy objectives.”

 

POLITICS

The concept of bringing back Hetch Hetchy Valley originated with the Sierra Club in 1999, and several mainstream environmental organizations have lent support for the cause although few have made it a high priority. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of financial backing and support from key political players to keep the vision alive.

Democratic County Central Committee Chair Aaron Peskin, a member of Restore Hetch Hetchy’s national advisory board, told me he’s been active with the group for at least a decade, making him a rare exception among the city’s political leaders.

“San Francisco is a remarkably sophisticated town that is technologically advanced and environmentally advanced, and this is an opportunity to right one of the most destructive environmental wrongs,” he said. “It’s time to start a local and national conversation.”

He acknowledged that there were a lot of technical issues to contend with, saying, “It should only be done in a way that makes sure San Francisco and communities that rely on the system are taken care of.”

Major funders backing Restore Hetch Hetchy include retired businesspeople from the financial sector, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, council members of the Yosemite Conservancy, and Lance Olson, a Restore Hetch Hetchy board member and partner in Olson Hagel & Fishburn, LLP, a prominent Sacramento legal firm that represents the California Democratic Party and elected officials.

Other influential and politically connected individuals have joined the effort as well. Marshall assured me that “no one from PG&E has given us a dime.” Yet the project still faces some powerful opponents. “I have opposed removing the O’Shaughnessy Dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley for decades and I remain opposed,” U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein told the Guardian. “Draining the reservoir would endanger San Francisco’s water supply, further jeopardize California’s water infrastructure and impose a huge financial burden on the state.”

Ed Lee does some ‘splainin

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Ed Lee, appointed San Francisco’s interim mayor early this year after giving the San Francisco Board of Supervisors his word that he would not seek a full term, filed papers to enter the race as a mayoral candidate on Aug. 8.

“I haven’t changed at all,” Lee said when reporters questioned his 180-degree turnaround. “I’ve just made a change of mind in terms of running for this office.”

Standing beside his wife, Anita, the mayor delivered a five-minute speech about what has transpired in his seven months as interim mayor, saying he was motivated to run by his accomplishments in office so far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u4DudZPY80

Lee said he had met with members of the Board of Supervisors and understood that some would be looking for an explanation on his change of heart.

Former District 6 Sup. Chris Daly has said he believes Lee’s run for mayor was scripted from the start. Whatever the case, an outburst that occurred as Lee was filling out paperwork certainly was not part of any script. Surrounded by news cameras, Charles Khalish heckled Lee, asking, “Sir, are you going to step down? You’re in the office under false pretenses, Mr. Lee.” When security surrounded him, he loudly protested, and a group of sheriff deputies and mayoral security officers with the San Francisco Police Department closed in and grabbed him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs0tFvWCNzo

While it was impossible for this reporter to see exactly what took place seconds before Khalish was forcibly removed, Tony Winnicker, a former press secretary to Mayor Gavin Newsom who is now issuing media advisories for Lee’s mayoral campaign, later claimed he wouldn’t have been removed if he hadn’t gotten pushy. The officers hauled Khalish down the corridor as he shrieked, “Heeeeeeelp!!” They restrained his arms behind his back and placed his head in a lock while they told him to stop resisting.

“He was cited for obstructing public business,” sheriff spokesperson Eileen Hirst later told the Guardian. “It is likely that he will be released as soon as the paperwork is finished.” She added that she had not yet seen an incident report.

The interim mayor said he made the decision to run over the weekend with the help of his family members. Chinatown power broker Rose Pak is not part of his family, but Lee’s daughter Brianna wrote in a January editorial called “Fear the ‘ Stache” that she had always known Pak as “Auntie Rose.”

Pak was a key driver behind “Run, Ed, Run,” the campaign backed by Progress for All that plastered cartoon drawings of Lee all over San Francisco. Progress for All will be the subject of discussion at the Aug. 8 Ethics Commission meeting, since Ethics director John St. Croix has stated he believes the political organization filed improperly as a general purpose committee. In late July, five mayoral candidates — including Board President David Chiu — joined Democratic County Central Committee chair Aaron Peskin in asking for an investigation into whether Progress for All had violated local campaign laws. Campaign finance reports, meanwhile, show that the effort was backed by a small group of inflential business insiders. Asked about the role of “Run, Ed, Run,” on his campaign for mayor, here’s how Lee responded:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBI5SSmVr4E

This evening, Lee the will participate in a mayoral candidate forum hosted by the Duboce Triangle/Castro/Eureka Valley Neighborhood Association at the Castro Theater at 7 p.m.

A song and dance at City Hall

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It was a lively scene on the steps of City Hall Aug. 2, as back-to-back press events featured live performances, lots of cheering, and support for new legislation that supporters hope will benefit low-wage workers, small businesses, and musicians.

Spirits were high at the Progressive Workers’ Alliance (PWA) rally, as organizers anticipated strong support for an ordinance they helped craft which aims to prevent wage theft by strengthening the powers of the city’s Office of Labor Standards & Enforcement (OLSE).

The Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance would double fees for employers who retaliate against employees seeking to have labor laws enforced, impose a timeline in which employee complaints must be addressed, and create new penalties for employers who fail to adhere to local labor standards. During the rally, workers speaking in various languages described their experiences of working long hours without receiving minimum wage or overtime pay.

Organized under PWA as part of a number of organizations including the Chinese Progressive Association, Young Workers United, the Filipino Community Center, the San Francisco Day Laborer’s Program, and others, the crowd of PWA members crammed into the Board Chambers and exploded into applause when the board voted unanimously to pass the ordinance on first reading.

Following a noon rally, youth with the Chinese Progressive Association’s high school program treated supporters and members of the press to a dance performance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7CVb4K3tcw

Directly afterward, District 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi appeared at the podium to drum up support for legislation he’d proposed to create a more affordable permit for cafes and restaurants wishing to host live performances in their establishments. He described it as a business-friendly idea that could “put musicians to work,” adding that more music in smaller venues could help dispel the notion that San Francsico isn’t as supportive of the arts as Chicago, Boston, New York, or even Paris. A preliminary survey found that some 700 restaurants could benefit from having access to less expensive live performance permits, he said.

Supervisors showed unanimous support for Mirkarimi’s idea, but Sups. David Chiu and Mark Farrell each added amendments to ensure that live performances couldn’t go past 10 p.m. in certain neighborhoods in their districts.

Mirkarimi invited Jazz Mafia to play a tune before the board meeting started. Here’s what they sounded like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjRbGBTEdMk

Videos by Rebecca Bowe

Ethics Commission to discuss Progress for All

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Ethics Commission to discuss Progress for All

San Francisco Chronicle reporter John Cote’s scoop highlighting how Recology executives were working behind the scenes under pressure from Chinatown power broker Rose Pak to encourage Mayor Ed Lee to seek a full term is just the latest development for a committee that’s raised eyebrows already, and it may be just the beginning.

Five mayoral candidates — board President David Chiu, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, state Sen. Leland Yee, former Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier, and businesswoman Joanna Rees — have teamed up to encourage the San Francisco Ethics Commission to investigate whether Progress for All has run afoul of local election laws, rallying behind an effort spearheaded by Democratic County Central Committee Chair Aaron Peskin in a July 28 letter to commissioners.

At the heart of the issue is whether Lee or any of his representatives have been coordinating with agents of Progress for All. If they are, Progress for All would have to be considered Lee’s own, candidate-controlled committee, Peskin asserts in the letter.

“Given the close relationship between Ms. Pak, the Mayor, and Progress for All, it is very possible that the committee has ‘consulted’ or ‘coordinated’ with the Mayor, and therefore its expenditures should be deemed to be made ‘at his behest,'” Peskin’s letter to the Ethics Commission argues. A City Hall insider told the Guardian that Pak — a primary driver behind the Run, Ed, Run campaign — is regularly observed going to and from the mayor’s office.

“If Progress for All or any of these other committees has been acting on Mayor Lee’s behalf, those committees may have violated the $500 contribution limit and prohibitions against accepting corporate, union or city contractor money, restrictions that apply to all candidate committees,” the letter states.

Financial disclosure filings for committees fundraising for the Nov. 8 election are due Monday.

Aside from the question of whether there is coordination between Lee, who has not yet announced that he will run for mayor, and Progress for All, concerns have been raised about city contractors aiding in the efforts of the campaign. Under the city’s Campaign Finance Reform Ordinance, contractors doing business with the city are not allowed to make political contributions.

(Given the revelations that Recology executives’ signature gathering efforts were done in violation of company policy, it’s no wonder Recology executives become bashful when approached by reporters who ask tough questions.)

Meanwhile, Recology might not be the only city contractor that Pak has encouraged to support Run, Ed, Run. A column that former Mayor Willie Brown published recently in the San Francisco Chronicle suggests that this isn’t the first conversation of this kind.

“One thing you can say about Chinatown powerhouse Rose Pak, she is not shy,” Brown’s column begins. “Holding court at the party for the opening of the new airport terminal, Rose was seated at the table with interim Mayor Ed Lee and his wife, Anita, and a host of other local officials. ‘I want every one of you to call his office and tell him he should run for mayor,’ Rose told the table. ‘And do it right away so that there’s no misunderstanding.’ Then she turned to the architect David Gensler. ‘Didn’t you do this terminal?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you remodel this terminal before?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Then your firm should raise a million dollars for his election campaign.'”

While Brown may not be a visible player in the Run, Ed, Run campaign, he’s certainly been at the table with a key driver behind it and Lee himself — and he’s using his platform in the Chronicle to get the word out about Lee’s potential mayoral campaign.

“The specific revelations of unethical and possibly illegal activity are very troubling and need to be fully investigated by the Ethics Commission as soon as possible,” Chiu told the Guardian.

Political consultant Jim Stearns, whose firm is managing Sen. Yee’s mayoral campaign, joined the chorus in calling for an investigation. “If you think about the fact that these guys still, according to press reports, are eating together once a week, and there’s not supposed to be any coordination … You have this committee that is essentially operating in complete disregard of the campaign law,” he said. “It’s sort of like there’s a crime being committed, and where’s the police?”

The San Francisco Ethics Commission will hold a policy discussion about how to treat Progress for All at its Aug. 8 meeting, Ethics director John St. Croix told the Guardian.

“We’ve told the committee that we believe they’re a primarily form committee, which is an independent expenditure committee on behalf of a candidate for office or a ballot measure,” St. Croix explained. “They’re claiming that there’s no candidate, so they can’t be that committee, even though they’re acting pretty much exactly like one would.”

As things stand, Progress for All has filed as a general purpose committee, he added. “A general purpose committee is what you would think of as a [political action committee]. They usually represent an organization or elected group of individuals, they tend to exist for a long period of time, and they contribute to multiple campaigns, whereas a primarily formed committee is created to support or oppose a single candidate or a single ballot measure in a single election,” he explained. Another key distinction: “Independent expenditure committees don’t have contribution limits the way that candidate committees do. Candidate committees have a $500-per-contributor contribution limit.”

Peskin, meanwhile, hinted that there may be more to come. “There’s a lot of it,” he said, “and I think there are many people who have stories to tell.”

Police say they’ve recovered gun used by Harding

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The San Francisco Police Department issued a statement this afternoon announcing that the gun that fired the fatal shot at Kenneth Wade Harding Jr. has been found.

“After a weeklong community effort, a neighborhood resident led officers from Bayview Police Station to the gun used by Kenneth Harding,” the SFPD statement says. “The gun, an AMT .380 caliber semi-automatic pistol, was matched through ballistic tests conducted by the San Francisco Police Department Crime Lab,” the official announcement goes on. “These tests confirmed that this was the same gun that fired the fatal .380 caliber bullet.” 

The police describe the weapon as a “small silver and black handgun,” and notes that it was “seen on the widely viewed cell phone video of the incident” and “picked up from the crime scene by an individual during the chaotic aftermath of the shooting.” 

One YouTube video showing the scene of the aftermath is titled, “Aftermath of Bayview gun battle in San Francisco,” and it has had 96,897 views so far.

At around 1 minute and 23 seconds into that video, an individual in a gray hooded sweatshirt reaches down and picks up an object off the sidewalk (which doesn’t look like a gun), but at another point in the clip, a gun-shaped object can be seen lying on the ground.

Lt. Troy Dangerfield, of the SFPD’s media relations unit, would not say whether the man in the hooded sweatshirt had anything to do with recovering the gun. Nor would he say whether an arrest had been made when the gun was turned over to police. “I can’t get into who turned over the gun, or whether that’s where we got the gun from,” he said, but asserted that ballistics testing had confirmed that it was the gun that fired the shot.

“We’re not speaking as to whether fingerprints are on it,” he added when asked if Harding’s fingerprints had been detected on the firearm. He said he did not know whether Harding’s cell phone had been recovered.

There are four separate investigations relating to the officer-involved shooting that occurred in connection with Harding’s death, Dangerfield said. They are being carried out by the District Attorney, the Office of Citizen Complaints, SFPD Homicide Unit and SFPD Internal Affairs.

Asked why SFPD officers did not move in quickly to snap up an unsecured weapon lying on the ground if a suspect had just fired and a crowd of alarmed bystanders was forming around them, Dangerfield said that the police had to prioritize officer safety — and in this case, he asserted, that meant keeping their weapons trained on a suspect who could still potentially pull out a gun and shoot at them. According to training protocol, “crime scene preservation” is a lower priority, he said. Asked if officers were trained to shoot to kill, he said, “we don’t shoot to kill, we shoot to stop the threat.”

Dangerfield went on to say that the video in which Harding is shown to still be moving while police stand with weapons trained on him would make a great police training video. “You do not remove yourself from the target until the target is no longer a threat to you,” he said, indicating that a suspect who is still moving is still perceived as a threat.

However, it was this aspect of the widely viewed video — that police continued to stand with weapons trained on Harding rather than calling for medical assistance after he’d been shot — that seemed to most inflame residents and protesters who’ve condemned the police response in the aftermath.

Dangerfield confirmed that data from SpotShotter revealed that a single bullet was fired, and then multiple rounds fired in succession 1.9 seconds later. The explanation that police have given for this, he confirmed, was that Harding fired a single shot and then police opened fire.

Assuming it’s true that Harding shot himself, as police have said, this suggests that the two police officers on the scene responded to a suspect shooting himself by firing eight rounds, just one of which entered through the leg. Asked why officers would respond to a self-inflicted shot in that way, Dangerfield said, “If you are a police officer and you’re running and chasing … and then shots are fired, what do you think?” He emphasized, “They’re trained to return fire.”

Civil Grand Jury: Parkmerced tenant protections ‘just talk’

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Civil Grand Jury: Parkmerced tenant protections ‘just talk’

The Board of Supervisor’s Government Audit & Oversight Committee heard from members of the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury this morning about a report it issued on the Parkmerced redevelopment.

“When you read this report, nowhere in this report does it say, ‘do not develop,'” said Michael Golrick, a juror with the civil grand jury. Yet he noted that the primary concern highlighted in the document was a perceived lack of tenant protections for residents living in rent-controlled units.

The assurances in the development agreement — that tenants will be moved into new units after their  existing units are demolished, with the same rent-control protections they had before — can’t be guaranteed due to unresolved legal questions, he said. “It is aspirational and inconclusive. Tenants will live under a cloud of uncertainty, possibly for years.” He added, “Until a court decides, it’s all just talk.”

Jennifer Matz of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and John Rahaim, director of the San Francisco Planning Commission, both noted that the Civil Grand Jury report was hitting on a legal issue, so the city’s formal responses will be prepared in concert with City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office.

Matz also noted that the draft of the Development Agreement which the Civil Grand Jury had based its assessment on had changed since the Civil Grand Jury report was issued, with new provisions to shore up tenant protections. She also charged that the report “fails to understand certain aspects of the Development Agreement.”

Meanwhile, residents organized under the Parkmerced Action Coalition are still hoping they may have a chance to reverse the Board’s decision to approve the Parkmerced overhaul by placing a referendum on the Nov. 8 ballot to ask voters whether the zoning for the project should be approved. The group of tenants, organized under the “Committee to Stop Mass Demolition of Housing,” submitted 18,487 signatures on July 8. The Department of Elections is still verifying them and so far, the referendum has not yet qualified for the ballot.

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