Rebecca Bowe

Mirant agrees to close Potrero Power plant by 2010

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By Rebecca Bowe

This just in from City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office:

City Attorney Dennis Herrera has reached an agreement with Mirant to permanently shutter the company’s Potrero power plant by the end of 2010, and to secure the Atlanta-based energy giant’s unprecedented commitment to join the City in actively pushing for the plant’s closure should state or federal energy regulators attempt to delay it. Under terms of the agreement signed by Mirant officials today, the company will also pay at least $1 million to the City to help address pediatric asthma in nearby communities and to initiate other mitigations in neighborhoods adjacent to the fossil-fueled facility. Mirant will pay another $100,000 to the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office for legal fees and costs.

The agreement was just signed this morning. We’ll give you an update soon with more in-depth information.

Moving backward

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s city budget was signed into law Aug. 4, but a group of city workers is pushing the Board of Supervisors to reverse a cut that they say reflects a giant step backward for progressive San Francisco values.

Service Employees International Union Local 1021, about 18,000 strong in San Francisco, has launched a campaign to restore pay cuts to certified nursing assistants (CNAs) and unit clerks who staff the city’s medical facilities, arguing that the demotions reverse a decades-old commitment pay equity between men and women.

Proposition H, approved by voters in November 1986, enshrined the principle of comparable worth in San Francisco. It required the city to ensure that municipal jobs dominated primarily by women provided wages on par with male-dominated jobs that have similar qualifications.

Jobs held by mostly female employees also tend be staffed by people of color, so the move to create equity in pay was meant to address systemic sexism and racial discrimination. Unit clerks and CNAs seem to fit the bill, and their salaries were gradually increased after 1986.

As part of the midyear budget cuts, 88 CNAs who work at SF General Hospital were laid off and simultaneously rehired as patient care assistants, a job with similar responsibilities but only 79 percent of the salary (from an average annual salary of $56,589 down to $45,032). Another group of CNAs is scheduled for similar demotions in November. Cuts to clerical workers’ wages are also pending and most will be reclassified with 15 percent less pay (from $52,845 to $45,266).

"It wipes out the advantage that they had," says Local 1021 health care industry chair Ed Kinchley. "Group by group, they’re wiping out the pay differential."

"This is the first wave of an overall effort to undermine comparable worth," union organizer Robert Haaland charged in a letter to the Board of Supervisors. "We ask you to join with progressives to defend the principle of equal pay for women and minorities."

SEIU held an Aug. 7 forum to discuss the cuts at SF General, with Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, and Ross Mirkarimi in attendance. CNAs and unit clerks packed the audience — a crowd that was indeed made up of many women of color.

One was Theresa Rutherford, a CNA at Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center. "We’re the first ones to note when a patient is not doing well," Rutherford explained to the supervisors. "It’s a job that requires a lot of commitment." She described the long hours and the bonds that develop with patients, saying CNAs are counted on by "the person who has no family members left — so you become the family member."

"Best-quality care costs," Rutherford added. "It’s not cheap."

Avalos, who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, said he was infuriated by the pay cuts. He spoke about a possible supplemental appropriation to address the issue. "We have to find the revenue for that to happen," he said. "Push as hard as you can on City Hall, and I’ll fight as well."

Tom Jackson, there representing Sup. Chris Daly, also urged the workers to apply pressure. "As far as labor practices go, this is a test," he said. "You’ve been fighting for decades [for pay equity] … and they’re ready to wipe it away because we have a bad economy."

Department of Public Health Chief Financial Officer Gregg Sass responded to SEIU’s charges by telling the Guardian: "We disagree with the SEIU comparable worth argument. Further, SEIU was not able to get member approval of a tentative agreement that might have prevented layoffs and position conversions during last fiscal year."

Supervisors added $500,000 back into the final budget to stave off some conversions. SEIU members contend that the add-back was supposed to retroactively restore cuts to the 88 CNAs, but Sass told us, "I am not aware of any action at the [Board of Supervisors] to that effect."

A memo that DPH Director Mitch Katz sent to Board President David Chiu noted that "difficult decisions had to be made to reach the financial target," and said the CNA conversions were made "following discussions with the city’s Department of Human Resources and SEIU."

At the forum, Halaand pointed to a report from the Controller’s Office revealing a 20 percent growth in management positions under Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration. "There’s a lot of padding of their wallets at the top. At the bottom, they’re devaluing," he told the workers. "There seems to be money out there, but it’s just not for us."

Campos told us he plans to request a hearing to examine managerial promotions as well as the ethnic and gender makeup of the city’s highest-ranking positions. As for whether some of these cuts might be restored, he told us, "I think that’s a real possibility. I am hopeful it will happen."

A study released this year by San Francisco’s Department on the Status of Women compares women’s median salaries to average men’s earnings. According to the report, the median annual wage for Latina women is 52 percent of men’s earnings; African American women earn 58 percent; Asian women 63 percent; and white women 88 percent.

Another round of pink slips go out Sept. 16, so SEIU is planning a rally at City Hall that day to demand that the city uphold comparable worth.

Sailing into the plastic vortex

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY If a plastic soft drink bottle got tossed into the San Francisco Bay and swept out under the Golden Gate, it might end up in the massive junkyard-at-sea that swirls through a current known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.

Nicknamed the Plastic Vortex, this massive collection of marine debris circulating in a remote area northeast of Hawaii is a sort of watery graveyard for all manner of human refuse. The ocean churns the waste, disintegrating the debris into bits and turning it into something more like plastic soup than a buoyant mass. Ocean experts say it’s a very big problem — the gyre is about twice the size of Texas and taking in more garbage all the time — and is only getting bigger.

This gigantic manmade mess — which exists in international waters not regulated by any particular governmental body — presents a slew of difficult questions. What long-term effects is it having on the marine ecosystem? Is there any way to clean it up? Are minuscule plastic particles and their hitchhiker toxins circulating back to people’s dinner plates via bioaccumulation?

These are just a few of the mysteries that a crew of researchers hope to unravel during an ocean voyage called Project Kaisei. The Kaisei (Japanese for “ocean planet”) is a 151-foot brigantine that sailed out of the San Francisco Bay Aug. 4 for a month-long venture into the plastic vortex.

The tall ship, the second of two research vessels commissioned for Project Kaisei, is operated by the Ocean Voyages Institute, a Sausalito-based nonprofit. Its counterpart, the New Horizon, is operated by the Scripps Institute for Oceanography and departed several days earlier from Southern California.

Project Kaisei spokesperson Ryan Yerkey describes the mission as a multipronged effort. Scientists’ first goal is to get a “snapshot” of the effects the garbage is having on the marine ecosystem. “These materials, they never really dissolve,” Yerkey explains. “They don’t just become part of the ocean. They break down at different degrees. Things like a plastic bag — it breaks down in the heat, and the sun and the water. And a lot of this stuff is so minute that it’s getting ingested by fish.”

Project Kaisei researchers will also test various technologies that might help them chart a course for cleanup. One idea — using reprocessing technology that has never been tested at sea — is to convert the marine debris from trash to fuel. “We’re testing the various reclamation and harvesting technologies,” Yerkey explains. “We’d love to be able to get that technology onboard our future vessels out there so they would be able to fuel future missions with the very trash they’re collecting.” The third goal will be to educate the public about preventive actions like recycling, since an estimated 80 percent of marine debris originates on land.

Algalita, a Long Beach-based marine research foundation, has conducted eight voyages in a 50-foot catamaran to study the Pacific Gyre. “Last year, in February, we were doing a night trawl — that’s when a lot of the marine life come up to feed,” explains Marieta Francis, executive director of Algalita. “We caught hundreds of these small, six-inch fish, so we thought this was the perfect opportunity to study them. And one of those little fish had 84 pieces of plastic in its stomach.”

Over the course of a decade, Algalita has taken hundreds of water samples from the gyre — and not a single one was plastic-free. There are believed to be two giant garbage patches in the Pacific, but the scope of the problem is only beginning to be understood, Francis says. “Now we feel, along with other researchers and even [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] that there are not two distinct patches, and that in between the two areas where it seems to be accumulating, there is sort of a superhighway that’s also collecting the debris.”

The Project Kaisei team appears to be embracing what its Web site calls “the biggest clean up Earth has ever witnessed.”

Sup. Mirkarimi pushes for transparency in mayor’s security detail costs

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By Rebecca Bowe

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Image courtesy James Ratcliffe

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi has introduced legislation that would require elected officials to reimburse the city for security-detail costs while traveling the campaign trail, the Chronicle has reported. Mirkarimi has been trying unsuccessfully for more than a month to get the Mayor’s Office to disclose how much is being spent on security for Mayor Gavin Newsom as he campaigns for governor outside San Francisco. In response, he’s been told that revealing that dollar amount would be a security risk.

The legislation also seeks to shine some light another longstanding transparency problem: Newsom’s public calendar. Mirkarimi’s proposed rule would require the mayor to submit a detailed schedule, describing how much time was spent on each activity listed.

The Guardian has noted the mayor’s tendency to reveal only a bare minimum of information in the official schedule he publicizes, telling journalists and concerned citizens virtually nothing about how the people’s business is being conducted.

Sunshine advocate Kimo Crossman, who has been publicly calling for a meatier mayoral calendar for years, pointed out that there are already open-government rules in place that have been ignored. “When the Guardian found out the Mayor Willie Brown was shredding his calendars, part of the Prop G enhancement to [the city’s Sunshine Ordinance] required keeping a very detailed calendar and preserving all correspondence in the Mayor’s office,” Crossman told us via email. “The [Sunshine Ordinance Task Force] has found that [mayor’s office spokesman] Nathan Ballard and Mayor Newsom have willfully violated these provisions and therefore committed official misconduct.”

“Subsequently,” he added, “no behavior has changed.”

TONIGHT: town hall to discuss a California constitutional convention

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By Rebecca Bowe

A lot has happened since we first reported on a campaign spearheaded by the Bay Area Council to hold a California constitutional convention.

We watched the state-budget drama unfold, a tearjerker with a surprise ending delivered by knife-wielding Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. (In the sequel, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg files a lawsuit against Schwarzenegger for cutting an additional $489 million in health, welfare and other programs through line-item vetoes, a move the lawmaker claims was beyond the governor’s constitutional authority.)

And in the meantime, the Bay Area Council has attracted lots of attention for its call to revamp the system, campaigning under the banner Repair California. The Bay Area business group has even started traveling around the state hosting town-hall meetings to rally support for a constitutional convention.

And tonight, it’s San Francisco’s turn to share ideas on how to fix California. (How about splitting it in pieces?)

PG&E employees to receive $17.25 million in overtime case

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By Rebecca Bowe

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It’s payday for about 700 Pacific Gas & Electric employees – and for some, the check will cover long hours they put in more than a decade ago.

As part of a settlement in a class-action lawsuit, PG&E must fork over $17.25 million in unpaid overtime going back, in some cases, to 1996. The settlement, approved by a San Francisco Superior Court judge on July 30, is the final conclusion of Conley, et al. v. Pacific Gas & Electric Company, a legal battle that wore on for nine years. It requires the utility giant to hand over back pay and attorneys’ fees for roughly 700 current and former employees who alleged that they were improperly classified as exempt from overtime and denied overtime compensation.

John Conley, who is still employed by the utility, worked as a Senior New Business Representative at PG&E when he and three other coworkers filed the lawsuit in March of 2000. “Some of us were working ten-plus hours a day, and one day on the weekend for four to six hours,” Conley said.

Did Newsom forget to mention COPS cash during budget talks?

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By Rebecca Bowe

The San Francisco Police Department received $16.5 million in federal funding through the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) hiring grant program, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced July 28.

That’s a lot compared with the sums allocated to other cities throughout the country, but it’s just a fraction of the $89 million that Mayor Newsom and then-Police Chief Heather Fong requested for the SFPD in mid-April. So did the mayor mention that the city had applied to receive millions for the police from the federal government when the budget talks were going on?

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian that he was never informed that the city had applied for the COPS grant. “If in fact an application was submitted, then in my opinion it’s incumbent upon the mayor’s budget office and the police department to inform us of this,” Mirkarimi told us, adding that in his opinion, it should have come up during the budget talks.

City Hall’s collaborators

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

As the Board of Supervisors prepared to give final approval to the city budget July 21, Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the board’s Budget and Finance Committee, told his colleagues the budget deal that he and President David Chiu negotiated with Mayor Gavin Newsom is "ushering in a new spirit of cooperation and collaboration at City Hall."

But at the end of the day, frantic last-minute revisions and indignant criticism from Avalos’s progressive colleagues felt more like a family feud than the culmination of a team effort. Avalos and Chiu were able to restore $44 million of Newsom’s proposed cuts and got the mayor to promise to fund progressive priorities, such as public health and social services. Progressive supervisors, however, voiced deep skepticism about whether Newsom can be trusted.

To make matters more complicated, the messy conclusion of San Francisco’s budget process coincided with the news that Sacramento officials had finally struck a state budget deal that proposes borrowing more than $4 billion from local government coffers. So the city’s spending plan, balanced with no small amount of pain, may already be thrown out of balance.

Compounding that problem, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that San Francisco voters will have an opportunity to weigh in on new tax measures that could help soften the blow of rapidly declining city revenues this fall, a situation that could quickly test this "new spirit of cooperation."

The tension at the July 21 meeting stemmed from Newsom’s decision last year to close a massive cash shortage by making midyear cuts aimed at the heart of the progressive agenda — even after giving his word that he would not do so.

In some cases, the money was never allocated to begin with. According to a report prepared by the city’s budget analyst, "The Board of Supervisors approved $37,534,393 in monies that were restored in the FY 2008-2009 budget, which include $30,657,078 in General Fund monies and $6,877,315 in non-<\d>General Fund monies. Yet $15,627,397 in restored monies were either cut to meet mid-year reductions or never expended."

The mistrust generated by this episode and others prompted Sups. Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, and David Campos to push for a series of last-minute changes that were designed to shield critical services from future cuts and give the board some power in its dealings with the Mayor’s Office.

"We need a hedge. We need a contingency. If we put a number of items on reserve … it gives us leverage," Mirkarimi noted. A Campos motion to place $45 million on reserve from the city’s seven largest departments was approved by the progressives on a 6-5 vote. Mirkarimi also succeeded in winning approval for a motion to move $900,000 from the trial courts to restore cuts to the Public Defender’s and District Attorney’s offices.

Other proposals failed to win over Avalos and Chiu, such as Mirkarimi’s pitch to target reserve funding for mayoral projects, including the Community Justice Center, 311 call center, and Newsom’s bloated communications staff. Daly’s suggestion to put $300 million on reserve also went nowhere.

"We are on the border of tearing apart a lot of goodwill," Avalos warned. "A $300 million reserve gets to toxic levels. I would be remiss in not saying that the mayor did give us his word. I believe that there was a new Board of Supervisors elected and … a new spirit of negotiation and collaboration in City Hall."

But Daly, making scathing references to "Gavin Christopher Newsom" as he fumed about budget cuts, clearly wasn’t buying it. Also on the afternoon’s agenda was his proposal to place a charter amendment on the ballot that would force the mayor to fund board-approved programs in the budget.

"Without it, we only have blunt instruments at our disposal," Daly said. "A blunt instrument is to take a significant fund, put it on reserve and have a hostage to make sure the administration doesn’t use this most significant loophole. This is crafted to allow a majority of the Board of Supervisors to place a special marker on an appropriation that the board feels strongly about."

But Daly’s idea went down in flames after Chiu and Avalos voted no along with Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Bevan Dufty, Sophie Maxwell, Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu. Afterward, Daly left the chambers and later returned to circulate a letter addressed to Chiu reading, "I am no longer interested in serving as Chair of the Rules Committee or Vice Chair of the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee."

Daly wasn’t the only one not feeling this new spirit of collaboration. All the last-minute changes clearly exasperated Elsbernd, who paced his corner of the room for much of the meeting, rubbing his forehead, and looking irritated. Eventually, Elsbernd and Chu were the only two votes against the final budget.

The prospect of new revenue measures also dimmed at the meeting. A proposal to place a measure on the November ballot calling for a 0.5 percent sales tax hike fell short of the eight votes it needed (Alioto-Pier, Chu, Dufty, and Elsbernd voted no). And it’s still too early to say whether a move to place a vehicle tax on the ballot can move forward because it’s contingent on state legislation.

The state’s funding raid could also hit the city hard. Leo Levenson, budget and analysis director with the San Francisco Office of the Controller, told the Guardian the city stands to lose $71 million in General Fund dollars and $32 million in other funds, although those numbers were still in flux at press time.

"The state must repay these funds within three years with interest," Levenson explained. "It is likely that San Francisco could be able to borrow money to mitigate the short-term financial impacts of this proposal, since the state is legally obligated to repay the funds within three years."

If the state goes after the gas tax, it could impact the city’s General Fund by an additional $18 million, Levenson noted, "so the city would need to backfill this reduction to sustain basic street cleaning operations."

So budget season isn’t over yet.

Gabrielle Poccia contributed to this report.

PG&E watch: The rate hike, the LNG pipeline and the $82 million corporate giveaway

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By Rebecca Bowe

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Image courtesy of TURN

Pacfic Gas & Electric Co. collected $82 million from the state last year as a reward for running energy-efficiency programs, even though an independent verification report conducted by the California Public Utilities Commission showed that the utility failed to reach target goals for curbing power usage.

In addition to the $82 million bonus, PG&E and other utilities received millions in ratepayer dollars to administer the energy-saving programs. But under utility management, large portions of these energy efficiency funds go to administrative costs, leaving less for actual energy-reducing measures. The funds are derived from fees on ratepayers’ utility bills. And despite its past failure to meet the goals, PG&E is asking for even more money on the next round.

Groups like The Utility Reform Network (TURN) and Women’s Energy Mattters (WEM) have long advocated for independent administration of energy-efficiency programs, citing evidence that nonprofits have had better performance at the helm, with lower administrative costs and greater success at curbing electricity consumption.

On Tuesday, members of the public — who foot the bill for these programs — will get a rare opportunity to weigh in on how their money is spent.

A “Public Participation Hearing” (PPH) will be held at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in San Francisco to discuss energy efficiency spending. The meeting is scheduled for 2 p.m. on July 28th at the California Public Utilities Commission, located at 505 Van Ness Ave. in the Auditorium.

A messy wrap for city budget

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By Rebecca Bowe

Emotions run high and things get messy when there’s so much less cash to go around. Just as San Francisco’s 2009-2010 fiscal year budget was finally approved at yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, the news from Sacramento was that the long-awaited state budget deal bridges California’s gaping budget deficit in part by raiding local-government coffers.

San Francisco’s own hacked-up budget went through a round of last-minute changes at yesterday’s meeting before approval, marking last-ditch efforts by Sups. Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi and David Campos to try and preserve add-backs to critical services and safeguard against future cuts. By the time a roll call vote was held on the final budget package, the document had been tweaked enough by last-minute revisions that Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu voted against it. And while those last-minute efforts might preserve some critical services, there’s no guarantee at this point that any new revenue measures will move forward to soften the blow of the cuts that were already made.

Bitter medicine

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news@sfbg.com

The Democratic Party has been promising a major overhaul of the health care system for a generation or more. Now, with President Barack Obama and his party’s congressional leaders in a strong position to finally reach that elusive goal by next month, this should be a momentous time for the reform movement.

So why are so many health reform advocacy groups unhappy?

The answer involves policy and process. Rather than pushing for the single-payer system that many progressive groups demand and say is needed, Democratic leaders immediately opted for a compromise plan they hoped would be acceptable to economic conservatives and the insurance industry.

But Republicans are still calling them socialists for doing it, while the insurance industry — which loves the portion of the legislation that requires everyone to buy coverage — is still spending $1.4 million a day to either kill the complicated bills or turn them to its advantage.

When congressional Democrats unveiled America’s Affordable Health Choices Act (HR 3200) on July 14, many reformists thought a long-awaited, dramatic overhaul to a broken system was close at hand. The insurance companies would finally be made to adhere to ethical practices, and the Democrats would defend their plan to establish a government-run health insurance option that could compete with private insurers and keep them in check.

“American families cannot afford for Washington to say no once again to comprehensive health care reform,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), who chairs the crucial House Education and Labor Committee.

The Democrats’ bill does address some critical flaws in the health care system. It would greatly expand Medicare to ensure coverage for low-income individuals, and would subsidize coverage for those earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, defined as $43,320 for an individual and $88,200 for a family of four. The bill would forbid insurance companies from denying coverage to patients based on a preexisting condition, age, race, or gender. It would eliminate co-pays for preventative care and establish a cap on annual out-of-pocket expenses. To pay for it, the proposal would create a graduated tax on households earning more than $350,000 a year, with the top bracket being a 5.4 percent levy on incomes of more than $1 million.

Progressive members of Congress threw their support behind the bill because — and only because — it included the public option. “The public option is central to our support of health care reform,” read a statement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), who chairs the CPC, was quoted in the Huffington Post as saying, “We have already compromised. More than 90 percent of the progressive caucus would vote today for a single-payer system. And so for us to compromise and get behind a really good strong public plan, I mean that’s as far as we’re going.”

While that statement indicates the precarious nature of the current legislation — which will likely be weakened further as it works its way through the process and merges with legislation from the more conservative U.S. Senate — many progressive groups aren’t even willing to go that far.

 

COVERAGE ISN’T CARE

Many single-payer supporters say some reform is better than none, and that the passage of HR 3200 would represent a major win. “We can advance many of the principles that we support with the House bill,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California and an organizer for the national reform advocacy group Health Care for America Now. The nation, he believes, needs to endorse principles such as universally covering Americans and making sure patients aren’t left alone “at the mercy of the private insurance industry.”

Yet other groups fear this cure would be worse than the disease, sending millions of new customers into a private insurance system that simply doesn’t work, and compounding existing problems.

“We’re still pushing for a national single-payer bill,” Dr. James Floyd, a health reform researcher with the nonprofit group Public Citizen, told the Guardian. “While we’re open to other options, we haven’t seen anything [in proposals by Democratic congressional leaders] yet that is acceptable.”

That position has plenty of support among the general public and reform-minded organizations, for whom single-payer continues to be the holy grail.

The current proposal “doesn’t change the system one bit,” said Leonard Rodberg, a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, who works in health policy. “These bills are requiring that people buy insurance, but there are no numbers about how much the insurance would cost. And if the cost of the insurance is still too high, you can remain uninsured.”

And as negotiations center on the government-run insurance option, the concept of scratching the status quo and offering free Medicare-like health care to every American instead has fallen to the wayside.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) got 84 co-sponsors for his single-payer bill, HR 676, and hearings were held in June to explore the option. But congressional leaders then took it off the table. The reasons why seem to be as much about political will as they are about campaign contributions from the insurance industry. As one high-level congressional staffer told us, many lawmakers won’t back a single-payer system in part because they “don’t want to have to respond to being accused of being a socialist by the right wing.”

Then there’s the insurance lobby. “They spend hundreds of millions,” the staffer said. “They lobby Congress, and they provide millions to campaigns. They have Fox News. But the single-payer movement is growing leaps and bounds.”

Rodberg said the insurance industry would love to see a mandate to buy insurance approved at a time when insurers are losing customers because the economy is shedding thousands of jobs each month. “This is a bailout for the insurance companies,” Rodberg told us. “But there’s absolutely nothing in this legislation that will control costs, because it just leaves it to the insurance companies and the market.”

Dr. Jim G. Kahn, president of the California Physicians’ Alliance and a professor at UCSF with expertise in health policy, told us he believes the proposed bill falls short of the goal of comprehensive, universal coverage. “‘Universal’ was recently redefined by [Montana Sen. Max] Baucus as 95 percent — i.e., 15 million uninsured,” Kahn told us via e-mail. “Reaching even that level will be hard, due to the complexity of enforcing an ‘individual mandate’ on families with only modest income (and hence no subsidies). And in eagerness to reach that level, more and more people will become underinsured, with inadequate coverage and a further boost in already high medical bankruptcy.”

Medical debt contributed to nearly two-thirds of all bankruptcies in 2007, according to a study in the American Journal of Medicine. The majority of those afflicted were solidly middle-class homeowners at the start of their illness, and most had private health insurance.

Health Care Now, a hub for single-payer grassroots groups, is planning a large rally in Washington, D.C., for July 30, the anniversary of the founding of Medicare, on which many single-payer plans would be based. “Single-payer is the only plan that would truly be universal and contain costs,” said Katie Robbins of Health Care Now, arguing that the current plan pushed by congressional leaders “doesn’t protect us from the ills of the insurance-based system as we know it.”

Other progressive groups are withholding judgment for now, hoping the good aspects will ultimately outweigh the bad. “We’re digging through them now. We support a bill that has a true public option, and the House bill has that,” said Consumer Watchdog’s Jerry Flanagan. “But we really dislike the individual mandate [to purchase health insurance]. The insurance companies really don’t want the public option, but they really want the mandate.”

 

LEAVING OPTIONS OPEN

Even if single-payer isn’t going to be the national model yet, advocates say it’s crucial that states such as California be allowed to experiment with the option anyway. Single-payer advocates in Congress have insisted the health care legislation be amended to explicitly allow states to do single-payer (otherwise, federal preemption laws and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act might prevent states from doing so).

On July 17, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) successfully inserted such an amendment into the bill that cleared the House Committee on Education and Labor with a 25-19 vote, which included significant Republican support. The amendment was opposed by Miller, indicating Democratic Party leaders oppose the change and may ultimately succeed in stripping it from the bill.

“George Miller is a longtime supporter of a national single-payer plan and health care reform. The truth is, however, there are not enough votes in the House or the Senate to pass a final bill that contains single-payer language. That is unfortunate but it is also the truth,” Miller spokesperson Rachel Racusen told the Guardian.

California is a hotbed of single-payer activism. Even a leading candidate for state insurance commissioner, Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) — who appeared on the steps of San Francisco City Hall on July 15 to receive the endorsements of a long list of local elected officials — has made single-payer advocacy a central plank in his campaign.

The movement is so strong in California that it actually had legislators vying for who would get to carry its banner. San Francisco’s own state senator Mark Leno, a longtime single-payer supporter, was selected this year to take over the landmark single-payer legislation previously sponsored by termed-out legislator Sheila Kuehl, which has passed twice, only to be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The more I dive into this issue, the more convinced I am that the answer has to be single-payer,” Leno told us. “The only reform that truly contains costs is single-payer.”

Leno doesn’t fault Obama for taking a more cautious stance — but he does believe the federal government shouldn’t block states like California from creating single-payer systems. “States should be incubators of trying different proposals. We have a great history with that,” Leno said.

But even with a Democratic governor, there’s no guarantee that single-payer would be approved. Mayor Gavin Newsom is running for governor, featuring health care reform in his platform. He chairs the U.S. Conference of Mayors National Health Care Reform Task Force, which is pushing for approval of the Obama plan. But even Newsom won’t promise to back the Leno plan.

“He doesn’t think single-payer is the best option now,” Newsom’s campaign manager Eric Jaye told us when asked whether Newsom would sign the legislation as governor. “He hopes and believes that as governor he will be supporting a national public option.”

But in the end, the governor may not matter. Leno said the political reality in California is that voters, rather than legislators, will need to approve the single-payer system. The funding mechanism for any ambitious health care plan would require a two-thirds vote in the legislature, a political impossibility.

“The difference in California is the voters will have the final say. And I’m excited about that. The voters of California will be able to say to the insurance companies, ‘We’ve had enough, now go away,'” Leno told us. He said he expects a ballot campaign in 2012.

Of course, it won’t be that simple. Leno knows that the insurance industry will spend untold millions of dollars to defend itself and a “status quo that is only working for them, not for anyone else. This is an enormously powerful industry and they control the debates.”

“Our effort here in California is an educational one. We have from now until the election in 2012 to make the arguments,” Leno said.

 

THE COST OF INSURANCE

Testifying at a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee in June, Geri Jenkins, a registered nurse and the co-president of the California Nurses Association, related the story of Nataline Sarkisyan. The 17-year-old girl needed a life-saving liver transplant, Jenkins explained to Congress members. “But CIGNA would not approve it,” she told them, “until I, and hundreds of others, protested. During one of the protests, I was with Hilda, Nataline’s mother, when she got the call of approval.”

Hilda’s relief didn’t last long. By the time the hurdle had been cleared, Jenkins testified, “it was too late. Nataline died an hour later.”

Nataline’s story sparked national outrage, and it has since become a flagship tale highlighting all that is wrong with this country’s health care system. But as the debate about health care reform continues inside House and Senate committee chambers, discussion about “universal health care” — a phrase with a simple ring to it — has grown murkier.

“We have a universal health care system now,” Flanagan said, referring to how all Americans with serious medical conditions have a right to treatment — even if that treatment comes with great expense in an overcrowded public hospital emergency room. “It’s just the most inefficient system imaginable.”

With the August congressional recess coming up fast and Obama leaning on Capitol Hill to shift into high gear on an issue that was a hallmark of his campaign, the pressure is on to vote on the historic health care reform legislation within weeks.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee passed a health care reform bill July 16 that is similar to the House bill, with the vote split along party lines. Now, national attention has turned to the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Baucus, which continued its efforts last week to achieve a bipartisan bill.

Many of progressive reform advocates simply don’t trust the players in Washington, D.C., to get this right, particularly Baucus. “He’s the voice of the insurance companies in the Senate,” Flanagan said.

A recent article in the Washington Post estimated that the insurance industry is spending an estimated $1.4 million per day to influence the outcome of the health care legislation, and pointed out that many of the lobbyists were Washington insiders who had previously worked for key legislators, such as Baucus.

The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group that tracks money in U.S. politics and operates the Web site opensecrets.org, launched an intensive study of health care sector lobbyist spending, including cataloguing industry contributions to individual candidates from 1989 to the present. Baucus received more industry campaign contributions in that time than any other Democrat, the CRP study reveals, with a total of $3.8 million. Henry Waxman (D-<\d>Los Angeles), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, received a total of $1.4 million in that same time, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) received $1.2 million.

Starting in the 2008 election cycle, the health sector gave more to Democrats than to Republicans, according to the CRP’s analysis.

To overcome that kind of money and influence, advocates say it was crucial to wield a credible single-payer option — a sort of death penalty for the insurance industry — for as long as possible.

“Having single-payer discussions on the table really informs the debate over the public option,” Flanagan said. “But by removing single-payer, it made the public option the left flank.”

Flanagan, like many, is worried about how a 900-page bill will turn out. “There are a thousands ways to get it wrong,” he said. “An easy way to get it right would be to just do a single-payer system.” ————

HEALTH CARE BY THE NUMBERS

Uninsured Americans: 47 million

Uninsured Californians: More than 6.7 million (about one in six)

African Americans without health insurance in California: 19 percent

Latinos without health insurance in California: 31 percent

Whites without health insurance in California: 12 percent

San Franciscans without health insurance: 15.3 percent

Rise in health-insurance premiums from 2000 to 2007 in California: 96 percent

Projected rise in health care costs per family without reform: $1,800 per year

Percentage of bankruptcies attributed to an individual’s inability to pay medical bills: 62 percent

Percentage of Americans who skip doctor visits because of the cost: 25 percent

U.S. rank of 19 industrialized nations on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions: 19

Jobs that would be created by extending Medicare to all Americans: 2.6 million

Annual U.S. spending on billing and insurance-related administrative costs for health care: $400 billion

Sources: Health Care for America Now, American Journal of Medicine, Physicians for a National Health Program

Journalist bruised by Deputy Sheriff while trying to film Supervisors meeting

8

By Rebecca Bowe

Luke Thomas, the journalist behind the popular San Francisco blog Fog City Journal, posted this YouTube video yesterday documenting how a Deputy Sheriff forcefully removed him from the Board of Supervisors Chambers while he was filming a commendation ceremony held during the Board meeting.

According to Thomas, Deputy Sheriff Thompson “dug his left hand fingers into my right side that caused an [excruciating] pain and literally pulled me by my skin and flesh outside Board chambers like a dog on a leash.” The incident began when the Deputy Sheriff told the cameraman to back up from a line of Aztec dancers who were performing, to which Thomas says he complied. But when he was told to step back a second time, Thomas says he complained that he was being prevented from documenting the event. That’s when the Deputy Sheriff grabbed him, Thomas recounts. “It shocked the hell out of me,” the photojournalist told the Guardian later. “I can’t imagine what was wrong with this guy. It was completely unwarranted.”

In the video, Thomas can be heard telling the Deputy Sheriff in disbelief, “Dude, you just assaulted me.”

Eileen Hearst, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Department, told us that “the photographer was getting in the way of the Aztec dancers. He was asked several times to please step away from them. He did not.” When asked whether the use of force was warranted in this case, Hearst said, “If [Thomas] feels it was unduly forceful, he … can call the investigative services unit, and we’ll take a look at it.”

The Fog City Journal blogger wasn’t issued a citation. “At the end of it all, [Thompson] capitulated and apologized for what he did,” Thomas told us.

Thomas says the incident left him with “a quarter sized area of broken skin surrounded by reddish contusions.”

S.F. helipads generate a whirlwind of controversy

10

by Rebecca Bowe

2007helicopter.jpg

The Children’s Hospital at UCSF in Mission Bay won’t be completed until 2014, but the debate about the helipad proposed for the facility’s roof has been simmering for several years, and the project is headed to the Board of Supervisors for approval in the next several weeks. Meanwhile, controversy surrounding a proposed helipad at San Francisco General Hospital flared anew this week, thanks to a piece of proposed state legislation that was working its way through policy committees in Sacramento. That bill, AB 1272, would have required that provisions for air transport be included in all statewide trauma system plans.

AB 1272, authored by Assemblymember Jerry Hill of San Mateo County and co-sponsored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano of San Francisco, was opposed by a host of San Francisco organizations. Staffers in Hill’s and Ammiano’s offices described it as a bill that would merely make it easier for trauma centers to install helicopter landing pads, rather than a mandate that any helicopter-landing facilities be built. But Loretta Lynch, a member of opposition group Neighbors of San Francisco General, characterized the legislation as a sort of back-door method of requiring a helipad, a move she said was an attempt to dodge local opposition by introducing policy at the state level.

The state legislation was downgraded to a two-year bill this afternoon, Lynch told us, so it’s a moot issue for now. But the organized, early opposition to it highlights the fact that efforts build helicopter landing pads at city hospitals is a highly sensitive issue in San Francisco.

Board approves sale of CTs – but there’s a twist

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By Rebecca Bowe

On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve the sale of four city-owned combustion turbines, with a final vote on the matter still pending. But an amendment to the ordinance built in some wiggle room for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to reconsider as strategies advance to shut down the Potrero power plant.

The CTs — which can be used to produce electricity during periods of peak demand — were nearly used to develop in-city electric generating facilities last year that would have replaced the existing Potrero power plant. Those plans were ultimately abandoned, the units have been sitting in storage in Texas ever since, and the Potrero plant has continued running 24/7. When Mayor Gavin Newsom introduced his interim budget in June, he included the sale of the turbines for $10 million — much lower than market value, but the maximum amount the city is entitled to under the terms of a settlement agreement that turned them over to San Francisco in 2003.

During last year’s debate over the construction of the city-owned power plants, it seemed like the city had no choice but to live with either the Potrero plant or the city-owned peaker plants in order to satisfy the requirements of the California Independent System Operator, a quasi-governmental agency that oversees the electricity grid and determines the amount of power needed to ensure reliability during worst-case scenarios. But in May, Newsom, SFPUC General Manager Ed Harrington and several others sent a letter to the Cal-ISO outlining a plan to have it both ways: They proposed closing down the entire Potrero plant and employing upgraded transmission lines, instead of in-city generation, to bridge the electricity gap.

If that plan is accepted by the Cal-ISO, all four CTs can be sold off, and the Potrero plant could finally be shut down. But whether or not the Cal-ISO is open to that idea remains up in the air.

Nip it in the bud

0

rebeccab@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Imagine if San Franciscans had the choice of sending the check for their monthly electricity fees to one of two places. Option A is a massive private utility company, serving up fossil fuel-fired and nuclear-powered energy, presided over by a CEO who got paid nearly $9 million last year. Option B is a publicly-owned program run by local government that offers a substantial percentage of green electricity from sources such as wind, solar, and tidal power. In San Francisco, which one would people be more likely to pick?

The intent behind community choice aggregation (CCA) programs, which in San Francisco is known as Clean Power SF, is to make Option B a reality. If successful, the program would signify not just a major advance on the green front, but a dent in Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s longstanding monopoly in the Bay Area.

The program development is inching along under the direction of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo). Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who chairs LAFCo, has poured a tremendous amount of time and energy into the city’s fledgling CCA program.

So when a proposed state ballot initiative surfaced that threatens to thwart statewide CCA programs before they launch, Mirkarimi came out swinging hard.

Titled the "Taxpayers Right to Vote Act," the proposed initiative would require that any effort to create or fund a CCA program be ratified by two-thirds of the voters. The measure would erect an almost impossibly high barrier to CCA development around the state, effectively snuffing out PG&E’s would-be competition and sullying local governments’ plans to embrace publicly-owned, cleaner energy alternatives.

Mirkarimi wasted no time in drafting a resolution against the measure and submitting it to the Board of Supervisors, telling his colleagues that the utility’s proposal undermines years of effort "to allow municipalities to go ahead and chart their own energy destiny so they don’t have to be on the syringe of fossil fuel-driven corporations like PG&E."

He also took issue with the name of the proposal, calling it deceptive and misleading. "The point is that we should not be manipulated by measures such as this, where voters would be required to have a two-thirds vote on something the state Legislature has already allowed us to pursue," Mirkarimi said. "It’s our own right, and corporate special interests shouldn’t dictate otherwise." The state law that grants local governments the right to pursue community choice aggregation, which was sponsored by then-Sen. Carole Migden, specifically prohibits actions that impede the progress of a CCA.

PG&E’s name does not appear anywhere on the ballot-initiative proposal, but a spokesperson for the initiative confirmed that the utility had paid the submission fee. The law firm listed as a contact for the proposal, meanwhile, has been enlisted by PG&E before. And Robert Lee Pence, who is named as the proponent of the initiative, has teamed up with PG&E ally Townsend, Raimundo, Besler and Usher on campaign measures in the past. That Sacramento-based political consulting firm describes its strategic consulting services online with this brazen slogan: "Moving opinions is what we do best."

PG&E did not return calls for comment.

At the June 30 Board of Supervisors meeting, supervisors approved Mirkarimi’s resolution on a 10 to 1 vote, with Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier voting no. And while a resolution does little more than create a formal record of the board’s position on a matter, Mirkarimi seemed to suggest that it was only the start of a battle mounting against this proposal. "Don’t be surprised [if] a number of municipalities align themselves in potential litigation against this," he said.

Sup. David Campos, an attorney who also sits on LAFCo, hinted that the city could enter into litigation on the issue. "I hope the city is carefully looking at legal issues that might be raised by the actions of PG&E," he noted at the June 30 Board meeting. "I think that there are legal protections we need to avail ourselves of, and I hope the City Attorney’s Office, working with the Board of Supervisors, can make sure that the city takes all steps that it needs to take to protect its legal rights."

Campos later told the Guardian that he had not yet spoken with the City Attorney’s Office about it.

When asked about pursuing legal action, the City Attorney’s Office would only say that "we’re aware of it, and we’re evaluating what we will be doing," according to spokesperson Jack Song.

Barbara Hale, general manager for power at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, told the Guardian, "We have certainly been talking with other cities about the initiative." But Hale added that the agency hadn’t taken a formal position yet because it is so early in the process. "It hasn’t actually been placed on any ballots yet."

Since the initiative was submitted, public power activists across the state have taken notice. Jeff Shields, general manager of the South San Joaquin Irrigation District, has gone toe-to-toe with PG&E on public power issues before. One of the most memorable battles occurred when a political consulting firm hired by PG&E hacked into SSJID’s computers in the midst of a tug-of-war over control of the area’s electricity infrastructure — only to get caught by the FBI and publicly denounced by PG&E. "Obfuscation is PG&E’s middle name," Shields says. "I know there are lots of people looking at this initiative, but I don’t know that there’s a specific organizational effort against it at this time."

Jerry Jordan, executive director of the Sacramento-based California Municipal Utilities Association — a statewide organization representing 70 public utilities — told the Guardian that CMUA would oppose the initiative. However, "we may wait until it qualifies," Jordan said. The initiative is still in its earliest stages, and the attorney general has yet to certify it as legal to the secretary of state.

Meanwhile, efforts to move forward with the CCA model in other regions are floundering in these tough fiscal times. The San Joaquin Valley Power Authority voted June 25 to temporarily suspend its CCA, an effort in the works for years that had a goal of offering electricity to customers at lower and more stable rates.

Spokeswoman Cristel Tufenkjian said the greatest obstacle was a contract with CitiGroup’s energy branch that was marred by tight credit markets. "When things started to go south with the markets, CitiGroup said it could not execute that contract," Tufenkjian explained. She also added, "We are opposed to the initiative."

The SJVPA bid to create a CCA was also hindered by opposition from PG&E. "For the last few years, PG&E has continually placed roadblocks in front of our program in an attempt to stop us from implementing community choice and ultimately not providing residents and businesses the opportunity to have a choice about who will provide them electrical energy," said Ron Manfredi, city manager of Kerman and chair of the San Joaquin Valley Power Authority.

The Board of Supervisors’ resolution against the ballot initiative condemns such roadblocks and vows to push through this one. "PG&E has a history of acting to maintain its monopoly in its service region, including opposing public power initiatives at the ballot and lobbying officials of California cities [and] counties against community choice aggregation in apparent violation of the provisions [of state law]," the text of the resolution reads.

As this ballot initiative moves through the approval process, it’s clear that a battle is going to heat up very quickly. "I think we have to fight this as hard as we can," Campos told us. "PG&E has been unsuccessful in killing [CCA] here in San Francisco, but they have certainly delayed it. Now they’re trying to make sure it doesn’t happen anywhere else."

Fishing for sympathy

0

By Rebecca Bowe

The saga of one of the biggest development battles in San Francisco took an unexpected turn today when Gap, Inc. founder and billionaire Don Fisher announced that he would back off from his plans for a private art museum in the Presidio. The proposed 100,000 square foot museum sparked widespread public outrage, with critics charging that it was an inappropriate location that wouldn’t jive with the surroundings.

The Chronicle broke the story this morning, quoting Fisher as saying:

“Doris and I will take some time to consider the future of our collection and other possible locations for a museum, which could include other sites within the Presidio and elsewhere,” Don Fisher said, referring to his wife in a statement released to The Chronicle late Wednesday that also said the decision was made “with disappointment and sadness.”

It must be tough, being a billionaire with a world-class art collection who can’t even build his very own private museum on an historic piece of public land without getting shouted down. Poor guy.

But as Fisher comes to grips with his “disappointment and sadness,” museum opponents now have a cause for celebration.

Shifting gears

0

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Bicyclists throughout the city cheered as the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board unanimously approved 45 new bike-network improvement projects June 26, a move that was hailed as a major step forward for cyclist safety on city streets and a win for the environment.

In a historic decision, SFMTA accepted the findings of an environmental impact review associated with the long-stalled San Francisco Bike Plan and green-lighted almost all of its near-term project proposals, a decision that could trigger the construction of 34 new miles of bike lanes throughout the city starting as early as August.

Plans also call for innovative improvements such as colored bike lanes, converting on-street parking spaces from cars to bikes, thousands of new bike racks, and an effort to ramp up education about safety for bicyclists and motorists. Three years after a court injunction came down on bike-network improvements in the wake of a lawsuit for failing to conduct a full EIR, the board’s vote was widely applauded as a pivotal moment for bicycling in San Francisco. Now that the EIR has been adopted, the process of lifting the injunction has been set in motion.

The vote followed more than three hours of testimony from avid San Francisco cyclists, who asked for more bike lanes and greater accessibility for would-be bicyclists such as children and seniors. Fewer than 20 people turned out in opposition and most people on the thumbs-down side voiced their general support for enhanced bike lanes, but took issue with some flawed aspects of one of the projects.

For a comprehensive design that could ultimately remove more than 2,000 parking spaces from city streets to accommodate bicycle infrastructure, there was remarkably little discussion about the loss of parking.

An old familiar debate about bikes vs. cars continues to grind away — but even Mayor Gavin Newsom called this squabble a thing of the past, touting the Bike Plan as progress for San Francisco and focusing his comments at a press conference on sustainability and livability instead the competition for space on city streets.

IF YOU BUILD IT …


Moments after the MTA Board announced its decision, a crowd of die-hard bike enthusiasts from the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition exchanged hugs and congratulations outside the City Hall hearing room. The vote was hailed as a major, hard-won victory.

"This is a momentous day for better bicycling and a better San Francisco," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the 10,000-member organization. The city "has taken a significant step forward in proving its commitment to smart, sustainable transportation choices, and we expect to see the numbers of people choosing to bicycle to increase dramatically."

Still, there are undoubtedly some who only expect to experience a dramatic increase in frustration when looking for a parking space. There are 880 lane-miles of streets in San Francisco’s roadway network, and according to SFMTA spokesman Judson True, a total of 880 parking spaces throughout the city would’ve been removed if the MTA Board had approved all 46 Bike Plan projects. (The board okayed 45 out of 46 projects; the hotly debated Second Street project, which would have stripped out a handful of parking spaces to accommodate bike lanes, was continued for further study.)

Amid the hundreds of pages of comments submitted during the EIR process was a complaint that the Bike Plan — often touted as a win for sustainability — could adversely impact San Francisco’s air quality by causing more drivers to circle in search of parking.

"More time will be spent by persons in cars as a result of a lack of on-street parking (already at a critical lack of capacity) searching for an available parking spot or stuck in traffic jams due to removal of car traffic lanes," one member of the public complained.

In response, the EIR points to San Francisco’s Transit First policy, which essentially says that the city will provide more of an incentive to take public transit than drive. "The social inconvenience of parking deficits, such as having to hunt for scarce parking spaces, is not an environmental impact," the EIR notes. "There may be secondary physical environmental impacts such as increased traffic congestion at intersections, air quality impacts, safety impacts, or noise impacts caused by congestion. In the experience of San Francisco transportation planners, however, the absence of a ready supply of parking spaces, combined with available alternatives to auto travel … induces many drivers to seek and find alternative parking facilities, shift to other modes of travel, or change their overall travel habits. Any such resulting shifts to transit service in particular, would be in keeping with the city’s Transit First Policy."

The underlying idea is that the Bike Plan can help to clear the air, fight climate change, and boost public health by making it more convenient to go without a vehicle — and more of a headache to drive.

As one commenter pointed out, the Bike Plan could also make life easier for people with disabilities who have to drive by replacing cars with bikes and thus freeing space in traffic lanes.

BRAKING THE HABIT


There are, of course, many sound arguments for nudging people away from driving. At a June 26 press conference, Newsom noted that 54 percent of the city’s greenhouse-gas emissions are related to vehicle traffic on the city’s roadways — and reducing those carbon emissions would go a long way toward making the city more climate-friendly, not to mention healthier for cyclists and non-cyclists alike.

Meanwhile, Bert Hill, chair of the city’s Bicycle Advisory Committee, noted that 40 percent of car trips in the city cover two miles or less, a distance easily traversed by bicycle. If more people opt to go by bike, the result could be calmer traffic, cleaner air, and possibly a boost for business. "No one goes shopping on the highway," one commenter pointed out during the SFMTA Board hearing. For all of these overarching benefits to be realized, of course, many motorists will have to change their behavior by electing to leave the car at home.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition points to evidence suggesting that many frequent drivers are in fact ready to transform into frequent bicyclists. "New bike lanes will … attract tens of thousands of new bicyclists," an SFBC press release noted. "More than one-third of San Franciscans say they would ride if streets had more bike lanes and were more inviting for bicycling."

Newsom sounded a similar note, calling the Bike Plan "inevitable" and asserting that the debate that "used to be framed in terms of two wheels vs. four … that is behind us." Instead, he added, it’s time for "a new narrative of collaboration and partnership" between people who share the road.

Still, a battle continues to be waged against the implementation of the Bike Plan. Mary Miles, the attorney responsible for securing the three-year Bike Plan injunction (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07), momentarily ruined the party at the SFMTA hearing by showing up, casting an icy glare, and warning the SFMTA board to "just stop now. We are appealing these actions." In the overflow room on City Hall’s first floor, Miles’ comments elicited hoots of laughter from a crowd of cyclists.

Miles’ client, Rob Anderson, is known for his cynical view that most people will never be encouraged to ride a bike, and that the Bike Plan unfairly rewards cyclists, a "special interest" group, at the expense of the majority of people, who drive.

Anderson and Miles are expected to appeal the SFMTA’s decision, possibly throwing one last monkey wrench into the process of moving the Bike Plan forward. Construction of new bike lanes can’t begin until the legal issues are resolved and the injunction is lifted.

PARK(ING) IT


A frantic driver who has just found a parking space might be thrilled to seize it, but Matthew Passmore has sparked a different sort of appreciation for parking spaces. One of the founders of Park(ing) Day, Passmore helped draw international interest in 2005 by temporarily transforming a parking space in the Mission District into a public park.

Since then the trend has caught on all over the world: all it takes is some Astroturf, a couch, and a few coins to pay the meter fare — and suddenly the public space usually reserved for cars is transformed into an attractive mini-park for pedestrians and passers-by.

The Park(ing) Day exercise, an event that takes place in September, has since prompted the creation of some 600 parks, free clinics, and other temporary "spaces" as part of the wider commentary about the allocation of public space. In Passmore’s view, "far too much of our city is dedicated to the automobile," and Park(ing) Day is just one way of illustrating this point.

For the soon-to-be 79 miles of bike lanes in the city, after all, there are still 880 lane miles built for cars, and San Francisco streets still accommodate a whopping 320,000 parking spaces. For his part, Passmore characterizes the removal of a few parking spaces as mere "growing pains," but emphasizes that in the long run, the Bike Plan will benefit everyone — not just cyclists.

Life by the numbers: More bikes = fewer bike collisions

6

By Rebecca Bowe

bike-signal-light-600.jpg

Things were finally beginning to fall into place for Jon Aguon. The 24-year-old college student and avid surfer and skater had completed his summer courses the day before, he’d just signed a lease on a place in the city, and he planned to spend the afternoon at a skate park on Potrero Avenue. He loaded up his skateboard, hopped on his bike, and started making his way there.

The trouble started when a bus stopped ahead of him, blocking the bike lane. In a matter of seconds, Aguon looked over his shoulder, checked for oncoming traffic, and began maneuvering around it. That’s when the Ford Expedition entered the picture.

“I remember the split second before I got hit, the roar of the Expedition motor. I knew exactly what this car was doing: accelerating to pass me,” he says. “Well, it didn’t pass me.”

Aguon says he bounced off the SUV, spun a 540, and then wound up landing on his knee. The shock set in, and he immediately curled into a fetal position. Moments later, he stood shakily. There was a sharp pain in his back, and a large blood spot was forming on his jeans at the kneecap. As he stood there dazed, the driver left his name and number with a nearby cyclist and drove off.

The bike accident occurred almost a year ago, and now Aguon — who suffered a broken rib, a badly sprained ACL and a bruised and swollen Tibia from the ordeal — says he’s still at just a fraction of his strength. Since the collision, “I haven’t even tried surfing,” he says.

Getting hit hasn’t kept Aguon from using a bike as his exclusive mode of transportation. But it did inspire him to speak out in favor of the Bike Plan, a comprehensive citywide network of new bike paths and amenities with improved cyclist safety as its centerpiece. “I’m not one of those cyclists who hates cars,” Aguon told us, adding that in fact, he loves to drive. But he believes that with improved bicycle infrastructure, accidents like his could be fewer and farther between.

Cyclists cheer as SFMTA Board approves Bike Plan projects

6

By Rebecca Bowe

IMG_0614.JPG
San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum (right) and cyclist Lynn Howe moments after the SFMTA Board declared its unanimous support for 45 new Bike Plan projects.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board approved 45 San Francisco Bike Plan projects earlier this afternoon, a move that will nearly double the number of bike lanes in the city.

The unanimous decision prompted cheers and applause from cyclists who turned out at the MTA hearing en masse to voice support for the citywide Bike Plan. Some 200 people signed up to comment at the hearing, and the overwhelming majority were supporters donning hot-pink stickers distributed by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition that screamed, “Double the number of bike lanes.”

For more than three hours, the board heard personal stories from people who get around by bike: parents, seniors, students, health-care workers, teachers, lawyers, landlords, scientists, and even a 14-year-old boy named Cameron who told the MTA Board that he gets nervous about getting “doored” while riding his bike. (“Sharrows,” the San Francisco-grown road markings that depict arrows in the bike lanes, are designed to keep cyclists out of the car-door zone to reduce the danger of being doored, or slammed by an unexpected door. The bike plan calls for marking 75 miles of on-street bike routes with sharrows.)

Fewer than 20 speakers voiced opposition to the plan, and most took issue with a proposal for Second Street that would reduce parking to accommodate new bike lanes and restrict left turns at various intersections. Several representatives from the South Beach Mission Bay Business Association and the South Beach/Rincon/Mission Bay Neighborhood Association said there hadn’t been enough community outreach conducted in their neighborhood, and called the plan for Second Street “flawed” — but most voiced their general support for enhancing bike lanes in the city. The MTA Board ultimately voted to remove the Second Street project from the package of projects up for approval, setting it aside for further discussion.

The cops and the carpetbaggers: Part II

0

This week, we report on the political fireworks surrounding the city’s budget process, which got especially loud last week at the dueling rallies outside City Hall.

As the Chronicle noted, Police Officer’s Association President Gary Delagnes — who lives in Novato — made waves by calling the city’s progressive Supervisors “carpetbaggers” and “idiots” while speaking at a rally organized by the police and firefighters’ unions to protest the Board’s changes to the mayor’s proposed budget. (“What the fuck right does Delagnes, who doesn’t live in the city, doesn’t pay property taxes in the city, doesn’t even get to vote here, have to complain about [Sup. John] Avalos?” Guardian editor Tim Redmond wondered on our blog.)

Mayor Gavin Newsom was onstage shaming the Supes right alongside the police and fire union leaders, helpfully reminding everyone that seismologists have said it’s not if, but when the Big One will strike. (Speaking of earthquakes, do we really want our hospitals to be understaffed and cut to the bone if disaster hits?) To really get a sense of how over the top the whole spectacle was, check out this slideshow of photos from the rally, set to the audio of Delagnes’ speech.

Photos, audio and slideshow produced by Rebecca Bowe

No surrender, no retreat

0

rebeccab@sfbg.com

The dueling budget rallies that preceded the June 16 Board of Supervisors hearing on the city’s spending priorities officially ended the conciliatory approach offered by Mayor Gavin Newsom — a rhetorical political gambit that the Mayor’s Office never really put into practice.

The emotionally charged police and fire workers’ rally — where Police Officers Association President Gary Delagnes riled up the crowd by ridiculing supervisors as "idiots" and "carpetbaggers" — featured Newsom as the guest of honor at an event overseen by Eric Jaye, the political consultant running both the firefighters’ union budget offensive and Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign.

On a stage lined with American flags and burly public safety workers, Newsom condemned the progressive supervisor’s proposal to amend his budget over a blaring sound system. "They’re asking us to retreat," Newsom said, in full battle cry mode, "and we’re not going to do that."

Across the street, city employees from the Department of Public Health held a competing rally, flying a banner that read "No Cuts to Vital Services!" It was painfully obvious that in a squabble between city employees, the mayor was positioning himself on the side of well-paid, powerful union members who got raises instead of layoffs, rather than the public health workers and advocates for the poor whom Newsom’s budget cut the deepest.

But before progressive supervisors challenged Newsom’s proposed budget — which ignored the supervisors’ stated priorities, despite Newsom’s December pledge to work closely with the board on it — the rhetoric was quite different. "We work through our differences and ultimately try to look at the budget as apolitically as possible," Newsom said during a June 1 event unveiling his budget. "It’ll only happen by working together."

Six months earlier, when the mayor made a rare appearance at a Board of Supervisors meeting to announce the unprecedented budget shortfall of more than $500 million, he adopted a similar tone. "We have the capacity, the ingenuity and the spirit to solve this," Newsom told the board in December. "It’s going to take all of us working together. It’s in that spirit that I am here."

The mayor’s proposed budget has spurred outrage from poor people and progressive supervisors, who charge that his decision to cut critical services while simultaneously bolstering funding to the police and fire departments is morally repugnant.

Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, and David Chiu responded by passing an amendment in committee to slash $82 million from the public-safety budget in order to restore some of the cuts to public health and social services. After that move, the spirit of "working together" quickly eroded, and seemed to be replaced by the bare knuckles politics of fear and division.

After the rallies, which even spilled indoors and devolved into shouting matches between the two camps, supervisors finally got to work on the budget. And they didn’t ask Newsom to retreat, they just asked him to listen and work with them.

The $82 million dent in the public-safety budget was described as a symbolic gesture to get the mayor to take progressive concerns seriously. "For many of us, it was the only way we felt we could have a seat at the table — a seat that was real, where the discussion was going to be meaningful," Campos said.

"I do not think that this budget is bilateral. It is a unilateral budget," Chiu noted at a Budget and Finance Committee meeting.

This year’s budget battle is especially intense because of the unprecedented size of the deficit, as well as the dire economic conditions facing many San Franciscans. California’s unemployment rate climbed to 11.5 percent in May, and stood at an only slightly less miserable 9.1 percent in San Francisco, according to the state’s Employment Development Department.

Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of San Franciscans in need of emergency food assistance, homeless services, and help with other basic necessities has spiked. Everyone seems to be feeling the pinch, but for the least fortunate, falling on hard times can mean relying on city-funded services for survival.

Against this dismal backdrop, big questions are emerging about the role of government. "The city’s budget," City Attorney Dennis Herrera noted at a recent hearing, "is correctly called the city’s most meaningful policy document. More than any other piece of legislation, it sets out the priorities that tangibly express the values of the City and County of San Francisco."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi took this idea even farther at the budget hearing. "Aside from the politicking and any of the hyperbole, we [have to] do the best we possibly can for all the people of San Francisco," he said. "But in particular, the vulnerable classes, because what is also at stake is … the key question: Who’s this city for? And who gets to live here over the next 10 to 20 years, considering how cost-prohibitive it is to be in San Francisco?"

The budget battle is shaping up around some fundamental questions: is this budget going to protect the politically powerful while ignoring the thousands who are in danger of slipping through the cracks? Or will everyone be asked to make sacrifices to preserve the city’s safety net? And as these difficult decisions are hashed out, is the mayor going to sit down with the board to seek common ground?

A board hearing on the cuts to health services — which state law requires cities to hold when those cuts are deep — illustrated the divide with hours of testimony from the city’s most disadvantaged residents: those with mental health problems, seniors, SRO tenants, AIDS patients, and others.

"If we make the wrong decisions, it will mean that our homeless folks will be in ever-increasing numbers on the street. It means that folks with HIV will not receive the care they need. It will mean that kids will not have the after-school programs they need during their critical years. It will mean that our tenants will continue to live in substandard housing," Chiu summarized the testimony.

Avalos, the Budget Committee chair who has led the fight to alter Newsom’s budget priorities, has said repeatedly that cutting critical services does not work in San Francisco. And even as he proposed the amendment, he expressed a desire to reach a solution that everyone, not just progressives, would find palatable.

"We want to talk directly to the mayor, to have him meet us half-way, about how we can share the pain in this budget to ensure that we have a balance in equity on how we run the city government," Avalos noted as his committee began its detailed, tedious work on the budget. "We can do that across the hall here at City Hall, and we can do it across every district in San Francisco."

The Board approved the interim budget that more evenly shared the budget pain on a 7-3 vote, with Sups. Bevan Dufty, Carmen Chu, and Michela Alioto-Pier dissenting (Sup. Sean Elsbernd was absent because his wife was giving birth to their first child, but was also likely to dissent).

If Newsom chooses to veto the interim budget or the permanent one next month — which the board would need eight votes to override — San Francisco could be in for a protracted budget standoff, the least "apolitical" of all options. But for now, the political theater is yielding to the detailed, difficult work of the Budget and Finance Committee.

Progressive members of the committee have already signaled their intention to scrutinize city jobs with salaries of $100,000 or positions in each department that deal with public relations.

Among those highlighted in a budget analysts’ report is Newsom’s public relations team, a fleet of five helmed by a Director of Communications Nate Ballard, who pulls down $141,700 a year. Yet when the Guardian and others seek information from the office — for this story and many others — we are often stonewalled, ignored, or insulted.

During the budget hearings, the disproportionately high number of positions with six-figure salaries in the city’s police and fire departments also came under scrutiny. "What has worked in a lot of other agencies is you have employees who care deeply enough about the City and County of San Francisco that they are willing to give back in terms of salaries," Campos commented to Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White during a budget hearing, referring to firefighters’ refusal to forgo raises.

Another looming question is whether new revenue measures will be included as part of the solution. While progressive supervisors continue to call for tax measures as a way to stave off the worst cuts to critical services, Newsom proudly proclaimed his budget’s lack of new taxes.

A press release posted on Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign Web site suggests that since raising revenues doesn’t fit with his bid for governor, it’s not likely to be entertained as a possibility. "Mayor Newsom crafted a balanced budget on time," a press release notes, "without any new general tax increases, without reducing public safety services."

It’s a stand that’s certain to yield more political clashes down the line.

"I don’t see how we can get out of this budget without bringing additional revenue into the system," Campos noted at the committee hearing. "Once people learn about the situation we are facing, they will understand the need for the city and county as a whole to contribute."

Dueling rallies pit “public safety” against “safety net”

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By Rebecca Bowe

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Mayor Gavin Newsom joined the city’s police, fire and sheriff departments yesterday afternoon in protesting the Board of Supervisors’ move to slash funding to those departments in order to restore cuts to critical services that the mayor had included in his interim budget.

In essence, the mayor was sending a very divisive message, pitting one set of city employees against another. Because just a few yards away from Newsom’s rally, health and human service employees were holding an event of their own.

Standing upon a stage equipped with a very loud sound system and decorated with American flags, Newsom praised police and firefighters for being willing to step up and be part of the solution to the budget crisis. He was greeted warmly by cheering and drumming, and before they introduced him they blasted a song with the lyrics “A family affair.”

Across the street, public-health workers were joined by Sup. John Avalos in their own rally against the deep cuts to the department of public health. “All we’re asking is to give a little so that we can share the pain of this deficit,” Avalos said.

PG&E attacks consumer choice

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

A ballot initiative backed by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. could amount to a death sentence for community choice aggregation (CCA) and expanded public power in California.

Dubbed the Taxpayers Right to Vote Act, the proposed initiative would require a two-thirds majority vote at the ballot before any local government could establish a CCA program, use public funding to implement a plan to become a CCA provider, or expand electric service to new territory or new customers.

The new hurdle would make it very difficult for a local government to move forward with a CCA, while at the same time making it much easier for a utility to defeat public power at the ballot.

Signed into state law in 2002, CCA allows local governments to buy up blocks of power to sell to residents, making it possible for cities and counties to set up alternatives to private utilities such as PG&E and, in many cases, to offer electricity generated by clean, renewable power sources.

The initiative is in its earliest stages, and it likely would not be placed on the state ballot until the June 2010 election. At this point, "it’s unclear how much of a campaign it’s going to be," according to Greg Larsen of the Sacramento public relations firm Larsen Cazanis, a spokesperson for the effort. "It’s a long way off."

That hasn’t stopped local CCA supporters from sounding alarm bells. "Urgent/Bad! PG&E State Ballot Measure To Kill Public Power & CCA," public power activist Eric Brooks wrote in the subject line of a widely disseminated e-mail last week. "It’s red alert time boys and girls," he wrote, saying the proposal "will kill all new Public Power and Community Choice Aggregation projects statewide."

Brooks isn’t alone: everyone the Guardian spoke with who is involved in the creation of San Francisco’s CCA voiced concern that the proposal could kill any future community choice efforts.

The proposed initiative was submitted to the California Attorney General’s office May 28 with the contact listed as the Sacramento law firm Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller & Naylor, a powerful player with a long history of working with PG&E on ballot initiatives. Larsen confirmed that PG&E had provided the $200 filing fee, the only amount spent so far on the embryonic proposal.

The official proponent of the initiative is Robert Lee Pence, apparently the same person who was listed as an opponent of Proposition 80, a 2005 ballot measure that dealt with utility regulation. Opposition to Prop. 80 was heavily funded by PG&E and other utilities, and the initiative failed by a wide margin.

Pence’s group, Californians for Reliable Electricity, listed Steve Lucas as a contact on 2005 campaign documents. Lucas is also listed as the point person at Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller & Naylor for questions regarding the Taxpayers Right to Vote Act.

The address listed for the organization is the same as that of Townsend, Raimundo, Besler and Usher — a Sacramento political consulting firm that also has a long history of working with PG&E on political campaigns. When asked about the PR firm’s role in the Taxpayer Right to Vote Act, Larsen acknowledged that they "may be involved as the campaign goes forward," but cautioned that any discussion so far has been preliminary.

The rationale behind the initiative is to protect taxpayers, Larsen said, because CCA programs "are major issues that communities undertake and require millions or billions of public dollars." The proposed initiative, he said, seeks to "ensure that voters — and frankly, their descendents — who will wind up being responsible for these programs have a say." If the measure passes, Larsen added, voters could still approve CCA programs — but with two-thirds of the vote, a supermajority that he contends is "staying in line with many other California requirements."

California Sen. Mark Leno, however, has a very different opinion. "I would hope that Californians would have come to understand that two-thirds vote thresholds are probably more responsible for damage to the state of California in the past 30 years than any other single factor," he said. "To hand a small minority controlling power is anti-democratic. This must be defeated." Leno also said he believes that the initiative would have drastic consequences for CCA programs if it passes.

Meanwhile, local CCA supporters say there is more to this than merely sticking up for taxpayers’ rights. If programs like Clean Power SF — the CCA initiative currently being developed in San Francisco — are fully implemented, then PG&E, which makes good money from its monopoly status, would face some actual competition. Naturally, the powerful utility would have an incentive to eliminate the alternative altogether.

Under the current system, PG&E "has to rely on the elected officials to kill CCA, and its much harder … to do that," says John Rizzo of the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club. But if the Taxpayers Right to Vote Act is enshrined in state law, "they could just pour in money and spread propaganda. Particularly the two-thirds requirement is just outrageous — it basically makes it impossible" to secure approval for any step toward CCA implementation.

"It’s a nasty ballot initiative," Mike Campbell, director of San Francisco’s CCA at the Public Utilities Commission, told us. "I think it’s clearly aimed at the heart of CCA." Campbell added that while he has been in discussion with SFPUC staff and others involved in hammering out Clean Power SF, he wasn’t at liberty to discuss a strategy for fighting the proposed initiative just yet.

Ross Mirkarimi, who chairs the city’s Local Agency Formation Commission — the body tasked with working in tandem with the SFPUC to implement San Francisco’s CCA — called the proposal "heinous — and yet I expect nothing less from PG&E.

"They can try to win by well-funded misinformation blitzkrieg," Mirkarimi noted. "If they’re able to spend $10 million without blinking here in San Francisco [on defeating a public power measure], they’re poised to spend tens of millions on this. As a state battleground, this elevates the fight that much more. We have to act in solidarity with other municipalities. We should be well-armed in repudiation of this effort."

There may be ways to attack the initiative in advance. The CCA legislation bars private utilities from seeking to undermine local CCA efforts. Assembly Member Tom Ammiano told us that the Legislature should look at how PG&E could be blocked from mounting a statewide effort to kill CCAs. "I think there’s some potential there," he said.

Julian Davis, who chaired the Prop. H campaign for public power last year, said he found the proposal very worrisome. "If you shut down community choice, you’re shutting down one of the major vehicles for clean energy," he said. To Davis, the initiative highlights "a disturbing trend of corporate America finding ever-more clever ways of tying the hand of local government in general. You know they’ll dump millions into this," he added. "The ultimate irony here is that none of us have the right to vote on anything PG&E does. None of us has a seat at the PG&E board table. It’s doublespeak."

Rachel Buhner contributed to this report.