Rebecca Bowe Archives — Page 9 of 35 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Market Street tenants still facing uncertainty

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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October 14, 2013

Anxiety continues to run high at 1049 Market Street in San Francisco, where 60 tenants who received eviction notices last month still lack clarity on whether they will ultimately be ousted or allowed to stay.

“I really feel like I’m being forced out,” said Chandra Redack, a tenant who has lived in the building for more than nine years and in San Francisco since 1982. “And that puts a lump in my throat.”

A meeting between city officials and John Gall, who owns the building along with a group of investors, is scheduled for Tue/14.

Gall told the Guardian it was too early to say whether he would withdraw the notices of eviction, as Sup. Jane Kim and Mayor Ed Lee have both personally urged him to do. “I need to figure out what’s going on after I have the meeting with DBI,” he said. “This is a very complex issue.”

The property owner said it was his understanding that neither Lee nor Kim would attend the meeting – they’re bound for China as part of a trip organized by the San Francisco-Shanghai Sister City Committee – but representatives from their offices as well as officials from the Department of Building Inspections would be present.

As the Guardian recently reported, DBI announced last week that it had found a pathway toward legalization of the illegal housing units, which are arranged in a dormitory-style setting with kitchenettes and shared bathrooms on each floor. They provide all-too-rare affordable housing near Sixth and Market streets, occupied by many students, artists and disabled tenants. With Twitter’s relatively new headquarters just down the street, rising demand for commercial office space has transformed the area and the building had been slated for conversion to offices.

Gall and his group of investors own several properties in the area, and up to 300 people might have been affected by eviction if the city hadn’t intervened. As things stand, the tenants’ fate remains far from certain. In a memo issued last month, property managers indicated that 1049 Market would have to be vacated entirely, because of “the City of San Francisco’s overly restrictive local building code requirements.” But even though a solution to the code restrictions has been identified, Gall hasn’t committed to reversing the evictions.

Gall emphasized that in response to pressure from city officials, he’d held off on issuing any new eviction notices either to tenants living at 1067 Market Street, a nearby property also under his investment group’s ownership, or to those in 1049 who hadn’t yet received formal notices.

“Could somebody have the right to be hopeful that it could be preserved as residential? I’d love to be able to give you more answers,” he commented, but ultimately would not say more.

With things hanging in the balance, tenants who received eviction notices now face the thorny dilemma of deciding whether to stick around and hope the ouster is reversed, or pack up and begin a new housing search. For many, opting for the latter means leaving San Francisco for good, since apartments in their price range simply aren’t available.

Tory Antoni with one of the items for sale on his Etsy site, called “the twit.”

On Sun/13, Tory Antoni welcomed a number of his neighbors into his small and tidy windowless studio, where he’d amassed a pile of artwork created by tenants residing at 1049. To aid those facing possible eviction, Antoni plans to post their artwork on his Etsy site, Antoni’s Collectibles, where he peddles antique objects to supplement his income.

“The actual artists that live here don’t get support from the city,” Antoni said, taking aim at public officials’ statements of support for arts in the rapidly changing mid-Market neighborhood. (Earlier this year, Mayor Ed Lee told the Guardian he was “very sensitive” to the concerns of mid-Market artists.)

“When we met with Jane Kim, she asked us, what can we do to help you? The answer is, just leave us alone! We just want to be allowed to do our artwork here in the city,” Antoni said.

Some of Antoni’s guests were consumed with worry over the looming possibility of eviction.

“This is really stressing me out,” said Victor Arreola, who has lived in the building for 14 years. “I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing with my life right now. I never thought this bombshell would be dropped on me.”

Arreola works at the Chanel makeup counter at Macy’s in Union Square, just a short walk from his home. He’s on temporary medical leave after sustaining a physical injury, and said that if he loses his affordable housing, he envisions being to stay in the city or take advantage of the medical assistance provided through Healthy San Francisco. He’s considered returning to Seattle, where he relocated from more than a decade ago, but that would require quitting his job, leaving him without unemployment benefits. “I can’t sleep at night,” he said. “Because I just lay awake in bed, and think, what am I going to do?”

Ben Cady, a photographer who said he mostly relies on disability benefits to get by with the occasional freelance gig, said his affordable Market Street studio was by far the most comfortable housing he’d lived in after years of dwelling in converted garages or in-law units, flying under the radar in pricey San Francisco. “This has been the cleanest place, and there are no pest problems,” he said. That’s in contrast with past living situations, where “we had mice with names,” he added with a laugh.

A relative newcomer to 1049, Bianca Valez, said she’d lived there for six months and paid a little more than $1,000 a month for her studio. “Once I got the eviction notice, I started looking around,” she said, and soon realized how difficult it was going to be to remain in San Francisco despite her desire to be a part of the city. A server at The Franciscan Crab Restaurant near Fisherman’s Wharf, Valez foresees having to work a second job in order to pay rent. But that would also mean postponing her plans to enroll in school, something she’d long wanted to do as a means of launching a new career.

Up one floor, Redack reflected on her longstanding connection with the city, which she’d first visited during the 1960s when Haight-Ashbury was a burgeoning countercultural magnet. She said her favorite part of living in mid-Market was the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity that the neighborhood has supported.

Chandra Redack says having an affordable place of her own has made it possible to focus on making music.

Now, faced with a possible eviction, Redack says she’s been inspired to try and work with the building’s other tenants to try and hold their ground. When others started stepping up to the plate to help organize, she said, “things got exciting, but also exhausting.”

An artist and musician, Redack said it was only after finding the unit at 1049, where she lives alone for roughly $830 a month, that she was able to truly focus on her creative pursuits. “I wrote 100 good songs in this room in 2006,” she said before handing this reporter a copy of her album recorded onto a CD.

Redack works in the customer service department at Rainbow Grocery – “I can walk to work in under 24 minutes,” she noted – and has recently met a number of customers who’ve faced similar housing challenges in San Francisco.

“I chose the route to fight for what I can – at least a little more time,” Redack said.

“If we win, I don’t want it to be just OK, we won – now let’s forget about the other people who are being evicted. I don’t want the city to say, okay, we did this little thing.” An activist with a strong commitment to social justice causes, she believes the moment is ripe for a new tenants’ rights movement.

The tenants have received some assistance from organizers with the Housing Rights Committee. “The landlord has no excuse now to evict the tenants,” HRC organizer Tommi Avicolli Mecca told the Guardian. “What’s happened so far is a testament to the strength that tenants have in organizing and refusing to accept that they have to leave.”

Fighting climate change, with crowd funding and Google Hangouts

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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October 11, 2013

49

A young San Francisco couple, Ryan Kushner and Amanda Ravenhill, are trying out a new approach to climate change activism that they hope will ultimately reach thousands of people via online videos and interactive web-based trainings.

Called Hero Hatchery, the ambitious project launched earlier this week. Celebrity-status environmentalists such as Bill McKibben, head of 350.org, and Tim DeChristopher, who made headlines for throwing a monkey wrench into a Bureau of Land Management auction, will lead free weekly online trainings on climate change, administered via Google Hangout, as part of the effort.

Concurrently with the massive open online training, they’re hoping to generate wind in the sails of a queer climate activist, Lauren Wood, who worked alongside other climate activists to start an organization called Peaceful Uprising in Southern Utah and has been designated as a Hero Hatchery fellow. When not working as a restaurant server to make ends meet, Wood spends her days organizing against the expansion of mining operations in Southern Utah. She got started through support work for DeChristopher, who spent two years in prison for derailing a federal land auction by bidding on parcels that were about to be opened up to mining.

An underlying goal of Hero Hatchery, Kushner said in a recent phone interview, is to reframe a debate that’s all-too-often controlled by PR strategists hired by corporate oil and gas interests. To this end, the plan is to use crowd funding to generate enough money for the fellowship, and to hire their very own professional-grade PR machine.

Kushner and Ravenhill met at the Presidio Graduate School, a San Francisco institution, where they earned MBAs in sustainable business. They traveled to Washington, D.C. last year and got arrested at the Keystone XL pipeline protests outside the White House, alongside activists from 350.org.

Their approach to activism seems to be less about staying at a public hearing till the wee hours to try and halt a mining permit from being issued, and more about using laptops to generate a buzz that can be converted into a form of popular pressure. There are thousands of environmental organizations doing grassroots organizing nationwide; rather than honing in on a specific issue, the Hero Hatchery team seeks to position itself as a kind of megaphone to amplify existing work. Kushner likes to use the word “elevate” when describing how Hero Hatchery will lend assistance to Wood, whom he hopes will be the first of many fellows.

Wood is the daughter of two river guides, and grew up rafting in Southern Utah, where she spent five years as a river guide in her own right. Now, her organization is focused on challenging open pit mining operations that have broken ground at PR Springs on the Tavaputs Plateau, which sits near the top of the drainage to the Green and Colorado river systems.

“The Green River and the Colorado River: they’re the front lines,” she told us, speaking by phone from Salt Lake City, where she was born and raised. Her connection to the rivers brought “this climate change problem into my heart and my gut,” she said.

She said she’d seen river-rafting companies that could no longer operate because the water is running so low, due to drought conditions. Mining operations will only consume more water, making the problem worse.

But as a Hero Hatchery fellow, Wood has bigger plans than just telling the story of what’s happening in her own backyard. She wants to get the word out about a wide variety of campaigns focused on climate change as a way to help support a more cohesive national climate movement.

“I think what I’m most excited about with this project is acting as the veins in a body, and acting as the interconnection between people who want to get involved and don’t know how,” she said. “This movement is increasingly interconnected. I want to be able to go around the country and talk to different communities about what it’s going to take to build a national movement.”

San Francisco agency agrees to legalize mid-Maket units slated for eviction

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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October 10, 2013

62

Moving can be a huge, stressful, harrowing ordeal. But now, some 300 tenants living at 1049 and 1067 Market Street might be spared from having to relocate thanks to organized resistance from tenants’ rights activists and the intervention of local elected officials to halt an eviction from going forward.

It’s the second major grassroots victory this week.

Building code violations made the housing units at those properties technically illegal, and the tenants were served with 60-day eviction notices last month. The property owner, John Gall, had taken out permits to convert some of the units into office space.

In response, tenant activists with the Housing Rights Committee and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic came to the tenants’ assistance and started a drumbeat on the pending mass eviction, which would have amounted to the largest since the I-Hotel in the 1970s. “We’ve worked really hard to get the city to do something aggressive,” housing activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca told the Guardian.

Before long, District 6 Sup. Jane Kim took up the cause. On Oct. 10, Kim phoned the Guardian to relate a surprising development.

Yesterday, the Department of Building Inspection “called and let us know they have found a pathway to legalization” for the units, Kim said. As long as some safety upgrades are made, DBI has agreed to exercise its discretion and waive code requirements that would necessitate renovations that aren’t feasible.

Once she got word that DBI would legalize the units, Kim phoned the property owner. “I did ask him to withdraw the notices of eviction,” she said. So far, Gall has made no guarantees that he would do so, but Kim said he’d agreed to “work toward a resolution over the next two weeks.” She said her office met with about 60 affected tenants on Oct. 9.

Kim said Mayor Ed Lee’s office also reached out to Gall to ask him to withdraw the notices of eviction.

“The ideal case scenario is to keep as many tenants in place as possible,” Kim said. “It could have really caused a lot of instability.”

The threat of that mass eviction would have impacted primarily students and artists living a stone’s throw from Twitter’s new mid-Market headquarters.

Two years ago, Mayor Ed Lee and other policymakers created a payroll tax break as an incentive to attract flourishing tech companies into the mid-Market area, a neighborhood that for years was marked by blight and some of the highest concentration of poverty citywide. As the Guardian recently reported, the corporate welfare stemming from these policies has soared, while the influx of tech startups and venture capital firms is transforming the neighborhood.

But the rising demand for commercial office space has brought the consequence of evictions, affecting not only residents but nonprofit organizations.

An important hearing was held at the Budget and Finance Committee yesterday about rising rents placing unbearable pressure on nonprofit organizations, many of which are located in mid-Market. Some cannot possibly run their operations anywhere else and continue to serve their clientele. Arts organizations are facing similar challenges affording rent in the increasingly pricey area.

“It’s turning from blighted to the hottest real-estate in town … and the unintended consequences are that people are being evicted from their homes and nonprofits are being evicted,” said Brad Erickson, executive director of Theatre Bay Area, who attended yesterday’s hearing. “It’s more than anybody can keep up with.”

He said Kim had been receptive to community concerns. Other supervisors have sought to address the issue too. At Tuesday’s Board meeting, Sup. David Campos noted, “Ellis Act evictions in San Francisco have reached a crisis level. I want to talk about a couple of things that we are doing to respond to the crisis.”

He said the Budget and Legislative Analyst would soon be issuing a report at his behest outlining the cumulative impact of Ellis Act evictions. He also noted that he’d been working with tenants’ rights advocates to design a way for the San Francisco Rent Board to better investigate tenant complaints alleging harassment by landlords. Campos also alluded to legislation that was in the works to address widespread real-estate speculation. “Unless we deal with speculation,” Campos said, “this crisis is not going to end.”

But in the case of 1049 and 1067 Market Street, at least, the tenants may soon be able to breathe a sigh of relief. “We’re hoping that this is a glimmer of good news,” Kim said.

Friends in the shadows

Michael Redmond

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October 8, 2013

36

rebecca@sfbg.com, joe@sfbg.com

It’s a simple fact of life: Money buys influence. But in San Francisco, despite strict sunshine laws to illuminate donations to city agencies and gifts to the regulators from the regulated, money still circulates in the shadows when it flows through the coffers of “Friends” in high places.

Major real estate developers, city contractors, and large corporations often lend financial support to San Francisco city departments, to the tune of millions of dollars every year. But the money doesn’t just flow directly to city agencies, where it’s easily tracked by disclosure laws. Instead, it goes through private nonprofits that sometimes label themselves as “Friends Of…” these departments.

They include Friends of City Planning, Friends of the Library, a foundation formerly known as Friends of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Friends of SF Environment, and Friends of San Francisco Animal Care and Control.

The Friends pay for programs the departments supposedly cannot cover on their own. Bond money can build a skyscraper, but sometimes not fill it with furniture. Agencies are barred by law from funding an employee mixer or a conference trip, so departments turn to their Friends to fill in the gaps. Adding bells and whistles to city websites, holding lunchtime lectures, hiring a grant writer — or, in the case of the Department of Public Health, bolstering health services for vulnerable populations — these are all examples of what gets funded.

The extra help can clearly be a good thing, but the lack of transparency around who’s giving money raises questions — especially if it’s a business gunning for a major contract or a permit to build a high-rise.

City agencies receive outside funding from a wide variety of sources. Sometimes grants are made by the federal government, or a well-established philanthropic foundation — and according to city law, gifts of $10,000 or higher must be approved by the Board of Supervisors. But in the case of organizations like Friends, which are created specifically to assist city government agencies, the original funders aren’t always identifiable. And the collaboration is frequently much closer, with city staff members serving on Friends boards in a few cases.

Friends board members told the Guardian that their partnership with government helps bolster city agencies in a time of increasing austerity, in service of the public good. But do the special relationships these influential insiders hold with high-ranking city officials come into play when awarding a contract, issuing a permit, making a hiring decision, or determining whether a developer’s request for a rule exemption should be honored? Without more transparency, it’s tough to tell.

City disclosure rules state that any gift to a department must be prominently displayed on that department’s website, along with any financial interest the donor has involving the city. But Friends and other outside funders are under no obligation to share their supporters’ names, much less financial ties, when they distribute grants. Meanwhile, the disclosure rules that are on the books seem to be frequently ignored, misunderstood, or unenforced, our investigation discovered.

How are donors repaid for their support? Consider the controversy earlier this year around Pet Food Express, which won approval in June for another store in the Marina District despite opposition from four locally owned pet stores in the area that fear competing with a large national chain. Pet Food Express won the unlikely support of the city’s Small Business Commissioners, some of whom reversed their 2009 positions opposing the chain’s previous application.

SF Animal Care and Control Director Rebecca Katz personally lobbied the commission to support Pet Food Express, at least partially because the company has donated pet supplies valued at $50,000 to $70,000 per year to the department. That’s a lot of money for a cash-strapped city department, but a pittance compared to the profits of an expanding national chain.

It’s moments of clarity like those, when the public can easily trace the line from donations to political influence, that show why disclosure is so crucial. But those moments are few and far between when trying to trace the funders of private foundations and Friends organizations, where deals often happen in the dark.

WHEN DEVELOPERS ARE FRIENDS

At the Merchant Exchange Building in May, a crowd of high-profile real-estate developers mixed and mingled with city planners, commissioners, and even Mayor Ed Lee, wine glasses in hand. Sources told the Guardian that most of the planning staff was present, and not all were happy about having ribbons and name tags affixed to their shirts, as if they were being auctioned off.

With around 500 in attendance, the event was an annual fundraiser hosted by the Friends of San Francisco City Planning, a nonprofit organization that accepts contributions of up to $2,500 per individual to lend a helping hand to the Planning Department. This year’s event was titled “Incubator Startups, New Jobs for the Future,” hinting that the development community shares the mayor’s affinity for new tech startups and the droves of high-salaried IT professionals they’ve attracted to the city.

Some Friends of City Planning board members are major real-estate developers who routinely seek approval for major construction projects. Others are former planning commissioners, or have a background in community advocacy.

Amid widespread concern about displacement, gentrification, and the overall character of San Francisco’s built environment, no city department has greater influence than Planning. An individual’s interpretation of the Planning Code can carry tremendous weight; it’s a series of small decisions that shape a project’s profits and the look and feel of San Francisco’s future. And with cranes dotting the city’s skyline and market-rate construction catering to the wealthy while middle income residents get priced out, the amount of capital flowing through the development sector these days is astonishing.

In this dizzy climate, there might seem to be something askew about affluent developers and land-use attorneys rubbing elbows with city regulators, all eager to pass the hat for the Planning Department. Whiff of impropriety or no, the fundraiser appears to be totally legal.

“We aren’t violating the law — that I know,” Friends of City Planning Chair Dennis Antenore told the Guardian. “We’ve had legal advice on that for years.”

There is close collaboration between Friends of San Francisco City Planning and the Planning Department — a partnership so entrenched that it’s almost as if the nonprofit is an unofficial, private-sector branch of the agency.

“We are certainly thankful and appreciative,” Planning spokesperson Joanna Linsangan told the Guardian. “They’ve helped us for many, many years.” The additional funding is needed, she said, because “there isn’t a lot of wiggle room” in the departmental budget.

Each year, Planning Director John Rahaim submits a wish list to the Friends, outlining projects he wants funding for. This year, he requested $122,000 for a variety of initiatives, including training support to help planners assess proposals for formula retail (read: chain stores). That’s a hot-button issue lately, and one that shows how seemingly small decisions by planners can have big impacts.

When the department’s zoning administrator ruled that Jack Spade, a high-end clothing chain that opened up in the old Adobe Books location on 16th Street, wasn’t considered formula retail and therefore didn’t need a conditional use permit, neither widespread community outrage nor a majority vote by the Board of Appeals could reverse that flawed decision. It was a similar story with the Planning Commission’s Oct. 3 approval of the 555 Fulton mixed use project, where Planning Department support for exempting the grocery store for the area’s formula retail ban made it happen, to the delight of that developer.

Even though the planning director makes specific funding requests each year to the Friends and pitches the projects in person at their meetings — and the Friends publishes a list of the grants it awards to the department online — the Planning Department is not reporting those gifts to the Board of Supervisors.

“I confirm that the Planning Department did not receive any gifts,” Finance and IT Manager Keith DeMartini wrote in official gift reports submitted to the Board of Supervisors for the years 2011-12 and 2012-13. Those reports were sent to the board on Oct. 7 and Oct. 4, respectively, well after the July filing deadline and after the Guardian requested the missing reports.

The Friends typically funds two-thirds of the requests, said board member Alec Bash, totaling around $80,000 a year. In 2012, the Friends awarded a $25,000 grant to make the department’s new online permit-tracking system more user-friendly, making life a lot easier for developers.

When asked what safeguards are in place to prevent undue influence when the director is soliciting funding from a nonprofit partially controlled by developers, Linsangan responded, “those are two very separate things. One does not influence the other.”

She stated repeatedly that planners are not privy to information about individual contributors — but the fundraisers are organized by a board that includes identifiable developers, and anyone who attends can plainly see the donors in attendance. Nevertheless, Linsangan insisted that planners would not be swayed by this special relationship, saying, “That’s simply not the way we do things around here. We do things according to the Planning Code.”

But as the ruling on Jack Spade shows, as well as countless rulings by planners on whether a project is categorically exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act, interpreting the codes can involve considerable discretion.

The public can’t review a list of who wrote checks to the Friends of San Francisco City Planning for the May fundraiser. Since the organization waits a year between collecting the money and disbursing grants, donors stay shielded from required annual disclosures in tax filings.

But Antenore says the system was established with the public interest in mind. “We don’t reveal the contributors, because we don’t want anybody to have increased influence by a donation,” he insisted. Bash echoed this idea, saying the delay was to “allow for some breathing room.”

Unlike some of his fellow board members from the high-end development sector, Antenore has a history of being aligned with neighborhood interests on planning issues, helping author a 1986 ballot measure limiting downtown high-rise development. He emphasized that the developers on the Friends board are balanced out by more civic-minded individuals.

Still, developers who regularly submit permit applications for major construction projects sit on the Friends board. Among them are Larry Nibbi, a partial owner of Nibbi Bros.; Clark Manus, CEO of Heller Manus Architects; and Oz Erikson, CEO of the Emerald Fund development firm.

“We’re not making use of [the funding] in a way that benefits these people,” Antenore said. “I wouldn’t do this if I thought otherwise. I have been careful to maintain the integrity of this organization.” The money is meant to facilitate better planning, he added. “I don’t think there’s any conspiracy,” he said. “We’re not financing anything evil.”

Both the Planning Department and its Friends dismissed the idea that the donations could open the door to favoritism or undue influence. So why isn’t the department reporting gifts it receives from the Friends to the Board of Supervisors, or disclosing them on its website, as required by city law?

According to a 2008 City Attorney memo on reporting gifts to city departments, when an agency receives a gift of $100 or more, it “must report the gift in a public record and on the department’s website. The public disclosure must include the name of the donor(s) and the amount of the gift [and] a statement as to any financial interest the contributor has involving the city.”

John St. Croix, director of the San Francisco Ethics Commission, confirmed that’s the current standard, telling us, “The actual disclosure should be on the website of the department that received the gift.”

Linsangan said records of the gifts are indeed available — listed as “grants” in the department’s Annual Report. But while the 2011-12 report lists grants from sources such as the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, there was no mention of Friends of City Planning.

The memo also says any gift of $10,000 and above must first be approved by a resolution of the Board of Supervisors. But last year, when the Friends provided $25,000 to upgrade the permit-tracking system, it wasn’t sanctioned by a board resolution. Asked why, Linsangan made it clear that she was not aware of any such requirement.

As is common, when it comes to adhering to disclosure laws, confusion abounds. And sometimes, only sometimes, politicos get caught.

READING UP ON DISCLOSURE LAWS

When the head of a city agency fails to report gifts totaling $130,000, how much do you think he is fined?

City Librarian Luis Herrera failed to report receiving that amount in gifts and he was fined exactly $600 by the California Fair Political Practices Commission on Sept. 19. Specifically, Herrera had to file a form 700 with the FPPC to state the gifts he received. From 2008-2010, the forms he turned in had the “no reportable interests” box checked.

The money was used in what he calls the City Librarian’s Fund, which is the money he keeps on hand to pay for office parties and giving honorariums to poets and speakers who perform at the library’s branches, money that wasn’t disclosed on the very forms designed for reporting it.

There are two stories of how the fine came about. Longtime library advocate James Chaffee said that it was the result of a complaint he filed with the FPPC in April, and indeed, he sought and obtained many public documents revealing the money trail. San Francisco Public Library spokesperson Michelle Jeffers disagreed, saying that the fine was the result of an ongoing conversation with the FPPC to figure how exactly to file the gifts appropriately.

“The law wasn’t clear around these forms and it wasn’t clear if he had to report them,” she told the Guardian. “For amending the reports you have to pay a $200 fine for every year it was proposed. We keep scrupulous records on every pizza party we have.”

When government officials receive “gift of cash or goods,” they must report them annually in statements of economic interest, known as a Form 700, to the city Controller’s Office. The form is kind of a running tally of who is receiving gifts from whom, a way for the public to track money’s influence in government.

The gifts came from the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, another nonprofit that bolsters city agency funding. Now Herrera has to list the $130,000 gifts from fiscal years 2008-09 and 2009-10 on his website.

What exactly does that accomplish? As it turns out, not a whole lot.

City Administrative Code 67.29-6 defines the reporting of gifts to city departments, and one of those requirements is to make a statement of “any financial interest the contributor has involving the city.” Now that Herrera lists the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library as donors on the department website, the statement of financial interest by the friends group is this: “none.”

There are myriad donors to the Friends of the SFPL, and the group doesn’t have to state the economic interests of its donors, or even mention who its donors are. The code requires gifts be reported to the controller, and the deputy city controller told us this doesn’t apply to the “friends of” organizations, or any nonprofit foundation arms of city departments.

“If gifts are made to a department, yes, they have to disclose, so people don’t get preferential interest in getting city contracts,” Deputy Controller Monique Zmuda told us. “I know it’s a fine line. The foundations don’t provide us with anything.”

Friends of the SFPL doesn’t provide money just for pizza parties. A breakdown of a funding request from the library to its Friends shows requests up to $750,000 to advertise the library on Muni and in newspapers, funding for permanent exhibits, and the City Librarian’s personal fund. That’s just the money it gives to the library. Other monies are spent directly on activities supporting the library.

As Jeffers pointed out to the Guardian, the money isn’t spent on “trips to Tahiti.” Friends of the SPL do good city works, from a neighborhood photo project in the Bayview branch library to providing books for children. But the question is: Who’s buying that goodwill and why?

The millions of dollars in donations made to the Friends of the SFPL don’t need to be approved by the Board of Supervisors, like gifts to departments do. They’re not checked for conflicts of interest or financial interest by any governmental body. Donors give and the Friends of SFPL spend freely, financial interest or not.

When our research for this story began, no financial statements were available of the Friends of the SFPL website. After a few days of inquiries, the most recent year’s financial statements from 2011-12 were posted to the website.

Ultimately, the San Francisco Public Library is one of the smaller city departments, with an annual budget that hovers around $86 million. The Department of Public Health is a much bigger beast, with a 2011-12 budget of around $1.5 billion.

One of its main foundations, the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation, is also one of the largest nonprofits that supplements city spending. In many ways, it could be described as the model of disclosure for city foundations, although its disclosures are not by law, but by choice.

FOUNDATION OF FRIENDS

The Department of Public Health relies on a few entities that fundraise on its behalf: the San Francisco Public Health Foundation, the Friends of Laguna Honda Hospital, and the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation.

“They’re private nonprofit entities that are separate from the department,” CFO Greg Wagner told us. “But their roles are to support the department in its efforts.” He cited examples such as sending its staff to conferences or hosting meetings, “things that we don’t have the budget for or don’t have the staff or resources.”

The lion’s share of the DPH’s gifts are funneled through the SFGHF. Unlike many of the assorted Friends groups or foundations that support city services, the SFGHF extensively reports the sources of its $5 million in donations. The donors include a veritable who’s who of San Francisco: the Giants, Sutter Health, Xerox, Pacific Union, and Kohl’s all donated between $1,000 and $10,000 in the past two years.

But the largest gifts to the SFGHF came from Kaiser Permanente, and its financial interests in the city run deep. Kaiser came into the city’s crosshairs in July, when the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution calling on Kaiser to disclose its pricing model after a sudden, unexplained increase in health care costs for city employees. Kaiser holds a $323 million city contract to provide health coverage, and supervisors took the healthcare giant to task for failing to produce data to back up its rate hikes.

In the meantime, Kaiser has also been a generous donor. It contributed $364,950 toward SFGHF and another $25,000 to SFPHF in fiscal year 2011-12.

The funding from Kaiser and a host of other contributors — which include Chevron, Intel, Genentech, Macy’s, Wells Fargo (another city contractor), and a pharmaceutical company called Vertex — does support needed programs. They include research into the health of marginalized communities, services through Project Homeless Connect, screening for HIV, and immunization shots for travelers.

But because DPH doesn’t count much of this support as “gifts” formally received by the city, it isn’t subject to prior approval by the Board of Supervisors, or posted on the department’s website along with the contributors’ financial interests. Major contributions are disclosed in a report to the Health Commission, something Wagner described as a voluntary gesture in response to commissioners’ requests.

“Most gifts to foundations are donations to a nonprofit and do not come through the city or DPH at all,” he noted.

This distance is maintained on paper despite close collaboration with the department. In the case of Project Homeless Connect, a program that holds a bimonthly event to aid the homeless, it supports programs headquartered in city facilities. Penny Eardley, executive director of SFPHF— which used to be called Friends of San Francisco Public Health — noted that her organization occasionally makes grants or seeks funding in response to department requests. And Deputy Director of Health Colleen Chawla is a foundation board member. It’s almost like these foundations are extensions of the department, except they’re not.

SFPHF also earns revenue as a city contractor. When DPH received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control, it contracted with SFPHF to manage subcontracts with about a dozen community-based organizations.

The web gets even more tangled. The president of SFPHF is Randy Wittorp — who’s also Director of Public Affairs for Kaiser Permanente’s San Francisco Service Area. It’s a similar story with SFGHF, whose board includes several General Hospital administrators, including CEO Susan Currin.

Former Health Commissioner James Illig said people shouldn’t worry, that hospital the staff would never direct foundation funds to pet projects or mishandle funds. “They maintain a separation and a firewall,” he said, for example noting, “Sue Currin is not directing funds to her own hospital.”

But he did admit that since SFGHF’s minutes are not public documents, that “raises a few concerns,” arguing the public should be able to inspect financial documents to decide if the foundations are directing funds lawfully to city departments.

Even when the public by law has a right to access financial records of a city department, rooting out corruption can be like pushing a boulder up a San Francisco hill.

FROM PATIENTS TO PARTIES

In 2010 and 2011, Laguna Honda Hospital administrators and staff used money from the hospital’s patient gift fund to throw a party. And then they spent it on airfare. And then they gave laser-engraved pedometers to the staff. All told, they spent nearly $350,000 meant for the dying and the infirm, nearly half of the total funds.

The incident was big, messy, and out in the public eye. It was an all-too-rare glimpse into the shady use of public funds by public officials. But when hospital staff members Dr. Derek Kerr and Dr. Maria Rivero blew the whistle on Laguna Honda’s misuse of patient funds in 2010, they were drummed out of their jobs.

Eventually litigation on behalf of the whistleblowers and their complaints of corruption were found to have merit.

Kerr’s vindication came at a meeting of the Health Commission in April 2013. In the packed City Hall meeting room, the public watched as Laguna Honda Executive Director Mivic Hirose read her apology to Kerr and Rivero aloud, even announcing a plaque in Kerr’s honor.

“The hospital will install the plaque in the South 3 Hospice,” she read, stiltedly, from a written statement, surrounded by microphones at the podium. “The plaque will say: In recognition of Derek Kerr MD of his contributions to the Laguna Honda’s hospice and palliative care program 1989-2010.”

Kerr received a settlement of $750,000 and something more important: His good name cleared.

But that conflict of interest was rooted out only after years of litigation that revealed the financial abuse through legal discovery of the department’s documents — documents that should’ve been public in the first place. ABC 7’s I-Team broke the story and did much of the reporting at the time, otherwise the entire affair may have been swept under the rug.

The misuse of funds was only brought to light with the revelation of public documents — revelations not possible with most Friends groups. The Laguna Honda Hospital Foundation has also had financial dealings with potential conflicts and a lack of transparency.

The now-defunct LHHF’s board chair, former City Attorney Louise Renne, made an interesting choice for her vice chair after she formed the nonprofit in 2003. Derek Parker was vice chair of the LHHF while simultaneously heading architecture firm Anshen-Allen, with a $585 million city contract to rebuild the hospital.

So he was not only rebuilding Laguna Honda under city contract, but soliciting and spending donations meant to supplement his project. Renne wrote to the Health Commission in December 2011 that LHHF’s purpose was to manage over $15 million in donations meant to furnish the hospital with beds, chairs, and other necessities. Eventually, then-Mayor Willie Brown found funding for the hospital, reducing the foundation’s role.

In a phone interview with the Guardian, Renne said the goals of the LHHF were only ever to furnish the newly christened hospital. “Our purpose was to fill the void, if you will, for what the city and its services could not do,” she said.

But in her letter, Renne advocated for LHHF to take an active role in fundraising for the hospital for years to come. “Today, the members of the Board of Directors of the Foundation continue to assist the hospital in various phases of its new projects and operations with projects approved by the City and/or the hospital administration,” she wrote to the Health Commission.

And Parker would have potentially managed millions of dollars flowing through donations for countless other hospital projects, while heading an architectural firm with contracts to build in San Francisco. We were unable to reach Parker for comment.

“I never saw Derek use his position as an architect or position for any political gain, I never saw it,” Renne told us. But no one else would see it either, because organizations like the now closed Laguna Honda Hospital Foundation operate without public oversight.

The Health Commission itself even noted this in its March 2012 meeting, the minutes describing then-commissioner James Illig as critiquing the foundation for not being open about its source of funding.

“Commissioner Illig thanks Ms. Renne and Mr. Parker for coming to the Commission,” the minutes read. “Because (LHHF) is a project of Community Initiatives, a fiscal sponsor for nonprofits, it is not possible to find basic financial information about the Foundation or its activities.”

Due to a quirk of her foundation being under the “umbrella” of a separate entity, Community Initiatives, Illig was never able to even get the LHHF’s IRS forms, he told us. “We tried to get information and reports, and the Community Initiatives [Form] 990 was giant,” Illig said. “It didn’t separate anything out.”

Illig told us that it made sense to have Parker on the board because he is monied and well connected, making it easier to solicit donations. But insiders close to the board told us that Parker’s position may have made it easier to swing getting other contracts for his firm.

Parker got another city contract building the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital at Mission Bay, slated to open in 2015. No doubt his firm got the job partly due to his reputation as pioneering architecture that leads to healthy patient outcomes — but then again, the board he served on also approved donations to research at UCSF.

Laguna Honda Hospital Foundation may now be defunct, but it serves to illustrate the lack of controls and oversight of the foundations beyond even gift disclosure.

OFF THE BOOKS

It might be characterized as a web of influence, cronyism, or just the way business is done. But is there something improper about all of this?

Private funding often represents a needed boost that allows for important work to take place beyond what could happen under ordinary budgeting. At the same time, it smacks of privatization. While departments and funders point to lean times in the public sector to justify the need for this help, the funding continues to flow whether it’s a good year or a bad year for city government. And at the end of the day, the most glaring issue of all seems to be the lack of transparency.

Are city departments ever tempted to bend the rules to lend a little help to their Friends? As long as the funding is in the dark, the public has no way of knowing.

Ethics chief St. Croix told us his office lacks the resources to visit every city website and check up on whether departments are following the disclosure rules. “If someone brought it to my attention that a department received a gift and didn’t post it [on the website],” he said, “we would look into it.”

But if the watchdogs need watchdogs, citizens who can’t even review documents that should be publicly available, then these quasi-governmental functions and the people who fund them will remain in the shadows.

Danielle Parenteau contributed to this report.

ADDENDUM

When city funders operate in the dark, one of the best ways to learn about corrupt influence, misuse of funds, and other transgressions is from whistleblowers. If you have a tip for us, send us snail mail at SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN, 225 Bush, 17th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94104. Or email us at news@sfbg.com. Just make sure not to use an email address provided by your workplace, which is less secure.

Alleged Silk Road owner busted in San Francisco

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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October 2, 2013

94

The government may have shut down, but that didn’t stop the feds from arresting Ross William Ulbricht, allegedly the owner of the Silk Road, an underground website that allows users to buy and sell drugs and other illicit items anonymously. The FBI also seized the equivalent of more than $3 million in Bitcoin, the cryptographic alternate currency used to make Silk Road transactions.

According to the Chronicle, Ulbrecht, who is 29 and lives in Hayes Valley, was arrested yesterday afternoon (Tue/1) at the Glen Park Library. He faces charges of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. The FBI also alleges that he tried to hire a hit man to go after a Silk Road user who was threatening to release the identities of Silk Road users.

According to the complaint, Ulbricht operated under the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts.”

The complaint said the Silk Road had generated sales revenue totaling 9.5 million Bitcoins and collected commissions totaling 600,000 Bitcoins. “These figures are roughly equivalent today to approximately $1.2 billion in sales and approximately $80 million in commissions.”

Finally, this profile of the Dread Pirate Roberts published in Forbes provides some insight about the person behind the Silk Road. Apparently, he’s a rebel with a cause:

“Roberts also has a political agenda: He sees himself not just as an enabler of street-corner pushers but also as a radical libertarian revolutionary carving out an anarchic digital space beyond the reach of the taxation and regulatory powers of the state – Julian Assange with a hypodermic needle. ‘We can’t stay silent forever. We have an important message, and the time is ripe for the world to hear it,’ says Roberts. ‘What we’re doing isn’t about scoring drugs or ‘sticking it to the man.’ It’s about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we’ve done no wrong. Silk Road is a vehicle for that message,’ he writes to me from somewhere in the Internet’s encrypted void. ‘All else is secondary.’”

Problems arise from Due Process for All amendments

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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October 1, 2013

10

At today’s (Tue/1) meeting, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is expected to grant final approval to Sup. John Avalos’ historic legislation, Due Process for All, which limits cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities under the Secure Communities program (S-Comm). But now that amendments have been incorporated in an effort to fend off a mayoral veto, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department has raised questions about whether the law can actually be implemented as written.

With the aim of reducing deportations and extending the Constitutional right to due process to all San Francisco residents, the legislation prohibits local law enforcement from complying with requests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to detain individuals who are otherwise eligible for release from custody. The requests are made under S-Comm, an information-sharing program between ICE, the California Department of Justice and the FBI that allows authorities to check fingerprints against immigration databases.

ICE issues civil detainer requests, which aren’t mandatory, asking local agencies to hold individuals for up to 48 hours to make time for the detainee to be taken into immigration custody. While warrants must be supported by probable cause, there is no such requirement for a detainer request.

An earlier draft of Avalos’ legislation barred the Sheriff’s department from ever honoring such requests. But now that the legislation has been amended with “carve-outs” directing the sheriff to comply with the ICE requests in certain cases, Sheriff Assistant Legal Counsel Mark Nicco is uncertain about whether his staff will actually be able to do the things the law requires of them.

“I ask that there be a consult about operational concerns. It’s the unintended consequences which brings me here before you today,” Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi told supervisors at the Sept. 24 meeting.

“The sheriff does want to comply with the intent and details of this legislation,” Nicco told us. But as things stood late last week, there were “concerns about whether we’d be able to implement certain aspects.” Nicco said his office has been meeting with the City Attorney and Avalos since the Sept. 24 meeting, in an effort to iron out some of those problems. “We want guidance on what their intent is, and for them to understand our physical roadblocks and operational issues,” he said.

The amended legislation directs the sheriff’s department to detain someone in response to an ICE request in cases where that person has been “convicted of a violent felony in the seven years immediately prior.” But the definition states, oddly, “the date an individual is convicted starts from the date of release.”

That’s confusing, Nicco told us. For one thing, there’s a big difference between the date someone is convicted of a crime, and the date they’re released after having served time as punishment for that crime. Unless the person was arrested and held in San Francisco, Nicco said, “The date of release from a prior conviction is not something … we can easily determine.”

The second criteria for when a person can be detained for ICE presents another obstacle, Nicco said. According to the amended law, someone can be held if “a magistrate has determined that there is probable cause to believe the person is guilty of a violent felony and has ordered the individual to answer to the same.”

But Nicco said the Sheriff’s department has no ready access to this information. “We do not have access to whether a person has been held to answer a certain charge,” he explained. “We would have to go to Superior Court and request information.”

The carve-outs were added, in part, to garner enough votes for a veto-proof majority approval. Mayor Ed Lee had threatened to veto the law as it was previously written, and police chief Greg Suhr had expressed concerns that it would shield violent felons from deportation.

But those exceptions to the rule have resulted in a lack of clarity and obstacles to implementation, Nicco said. “If it were flat-out, no ICE detainers, it wouldn’t be an issue,” he noted.

A coalition of advocates from immigrant communities plans to attend the Tue/1 meeting to celebrate the final approval of the law, even though it is a compromised version.

“The amendments, unfortunately, do allow potentially unconstitutional immigration ‘holds’ under very limited circumstances,” advocates with the California Immigrant Policy Centered noted in a media advisory. “But the ordinance will protect most San Franciscans from the abusive requests.”

“Sleep-in” planned in response to Albany Bulb evictions

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 30, 2013

25

As we recently reported, more than 60 homeless residents are facing eviction from the Albany Bulb. For decades, penniless and marginalized Bay Area residents have taken up residence in the unique shoreline park, creating makeshift structures and a tenuous yet tight-knit community. A former landfill, the Bulb is also a popular urban refuge that lures weekend adventurers and dog walkers with wild nature trails and DIY art pieces.

The homeless residents have long been at the center of battles over the park’s use. Most recently, the city of Albany ordered police to begin enforcing an ordinance prohibiting camping on the land, effective in October.

In response, a group called Share the Bulb has organized a sleep-in, “to defend the space against impending eviction,” according to a Facebook event announcement. The one-night campout will take place Wed/2 at 6pm, featuring a documentary screening, potluck dinner and live musical performance, according to the event page.

“We hope that all attendees will respect Bulb residents’ leadership,” a Share the Bulb organizer wrote on the event website. “They have requested that people come with the plan of staying for one night only, and that the event not be branded as Occupy. We will discuss plans for the future on Wednesday night.” Organizers have requested that participants meet at the Bulb parking lot for directions to “resident-approved camping locations.”

We also heard from local filmmaker Ken Fisher, who produced a short film on the plight of the Bulb’s homeless residents. (Another documentary on the Bulb, by Andy Kreamer, is featured on the Share the Bulb site). Fisher’s film features two individuals Carly Nairn interviewed for her Bay Guardian story: Attorney Osha Neumann, who is advocating on behalf the homeless residents; and Bulb dweller Katherine Cody, who goes by KC and has been living in the shoreline park for three years. Check it out:

Blow your mind

Michael Redmond

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September 24, 2013

6

rebecca@sfbg.com

SEX Examples of Americans’ obsession with sex abound. It seemed the mainstream media would never get over Miley Cyrus’ ostentatious twerking at the Video Music Awards. Politician Anthony Weiner managed to live down his sexting scandal, only to mar his comeback with still more sexting. Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” broke records for its searing popularity, but its rape-y message inspired a feminist parody, substituting the lyrics “you’re a good girl” with “you’re a douchebag.”

One researcher in the field of human sexuality estimates that 95 percent of all the sexual activity humans have — in every society — is for pleasure, not for reproduction. Despite the fact that almost everyone is apparently having sex for the sake of sex, we still live in a country where certain public schools stick to abstinence-only sex education with zero information about birth control. Meanwhile, right-wing opposition to women’s reproductive rights threatens to send laws governing access to abortion and contraceptives hurtling back to the Dark Ages.

Given the ongoing cultural clash, it’s fitting that San Francisco — famous for its sexual institutions like the Folsom Street Fair, Kink.com, Good Vibrations, and the Lusty Lady (may she rest in peace) — is poised to lead the way in offering one of the only Ph.D. programs in human sexuality nationwide.

San Francisco already boasts numerous pioneers in sexual education and related studies. City College of San Francisco, for example, began offering one of the first gay literature courses in the country in 1972, leading to the 1989 establishment of the first Gay and Lesbian Studies Department nationwide. And the National Sexuality Resource Center at San Francisco State University was created to promote sexual literacy, with the goal of replacing misinformation about sexuality and dispelling negative attitudes with evidence-based research on sexual health, education and rights.

The newest Ph.D. program will be housed at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS, www.ciis.edu), and is scheduled to get under way in 2014. Gilbert Herdt, an anthropologist who founded SF State’s National Sexuality Resource Center and has been working in the field of human sexuality for some 35 years, is the program director.

Formerly a professor at Stanford and the University of Chicago, Herdt had long dreamed of creating a Ph.D. program with a multidisciplinary approach to human sexuality, an effort he believes would have been stymied a decade ago by political resistance.

“A lot of people are shocked when they realize there is only one Ph.D. program in the United States on human sexuality,” Herdt notes, referencing a program offered at Philadelphia’s Widener University focused on sex education. The CIIS program will be the first accredited doctoral program in human sexuality in the western United States.

It took decades for women’s studies and gender studies to be considered Ph.D.-worthy academic disciplines, Herdt points out. But when it comes to this endeavor, “there’s one big difference: Human sexuality remains a taboo in the United States.”

Consider this. In the Netherlands, Germany and France, sex education in schools can begin as early as kindergarten. Here in the US, states such as Florida still lack comprehensive programs offering in-depth information on sexually transmitted disease or contraception. It might not come as much of a surprise that Western Europe has lower rates of unwanted teen pregnancy, HIV and STDs.

Sex ed was eroded as part of a political backlash. “In the ’70s, there began to be a series of moral campaigns — some were directed against abortion … some were directed against homosexuality,” Herdt notes. “When Reagan was elected, it ushered in a whole new social campaign — and for the first time, opposition to sex education and opposition to abortion was joined, and served as a bridge to connect different groups who had previously never been working together: groups that were against gun control, groups that were against abortion rights, and groups that were against homosexuality.”

All of which has led to the current state of affairs, and as things stand, “I consider the United States one of the most backward countries when it comes to comprehensive sexual education and positive values regarding sexual behavior,” Herdt says. But he’s hoping to play a role in changing that.

The Ph.D. program at CIIS seeks to train a new generation of experts in human sexuality with a pair of concentrations. The first centers on clinical practice for contemporary practitioners, marriage and family therapists or psychiatrists. The current training requirement for clinicians on human sexuality is a measly eight hours, which “just shows the disregard that society has for sexual pleasure, and sexual wellbeing and relationship formation, and so on,” in Herdt’s view.

The second concentration centers on sexual policy leadership. Asked to identify some of the most pressing policy issues of concern to sexologists, the program director said existing gaps in comprehensive sex education is a top priority, and predicted transgender rights would intensify as a major issue. “I also feel that the Republican assault on women’s bodies, women’s contraceptive and reproductive rights — this is a huge and very dangerous area.”

Herdt became involved with CIIS through a conference called Expanding the Circle, which merges the LGBT community with individuals working in higher education from throughout the country. Prior to that, he ran the National Sexuality Resource Center at SF State. Asked why he’d looked to CIIS rather than a major university to house the program, Herdt responded, “these large premier institutions, such as Stanford and Berkeley — you know, they have many, many extremely important programs … But they do have a more traditional emphasis when it comes to disciplines.”

At CIIS, on the other hand, he found openness to the kind of academic program he envisioned. Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington, columnist and author of numerous books on sex, will be a professor there along with Sean Cahill, director of Health Policy Research at The Fenway Institute and co-author of LGBT Youth in America’s Schools.

Promoting sexual literacy is just as important of a program goal as influencing policy, Herdt said. “Americans really continue to have very sex-negative attitudes when it comes to the body, the integration of sexuality with all the elements of their lives. So many people feel that sex is fragmented in their lives, and they don’t have a holistic sense of wellbeing.”

While advancements in neuroscience, psychology and other forms of research have all served to further our understanding of sexuality, Herdt bristles at the idea that it is all hard-wired.

“I’m very much aware that Americans continue to have a view that when it comes to the important things in sexuality, they’re all hard-wired in the brain,” he says. “I do not agree with that view. I believe that the most important things in human sexuality are the things we learn in society. The values we learn, the ethics, the way we can form relationships. The way we learn to love. Or not to love, to hate. These are such tremendously important issues in human sexuality and human development.” He added, “Let’s put it in its proper way: It’s interactive.”

Evictions and gentrification fuel widespread concern in the Mission

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 24, 2013

202

A mix of neighborhood merchants, community activists and a couple City Hall staffers met for a community forum Sept. 23 on Mission gentrification, voicing anger and frustration about rising displacement in the face of soaring rents.

Arranged by organizer Andy Blue, the forum was hosted by Rose Aguilar of Your Call Radio and held at the Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics on Valencia Street.

The recent controversy stemming from a bid by high-end retailer Jack Spade to move into a 16th Street storefront catalyzed the discussion, but many addressed the overarching transformation of a neighborhood that has been flooded with high-salaried residents who can afford to pay top dollar.

Gabriel Medina, policy manager of the Mission Economic Development Agency, said he’s troubled by the displacement of Latino-owned businesses. About 80 percent of Latino-owned businesses are passed onto proprietors’ children, he said, representing critical assets in a pricey city like San Francisco. “It’s getting cheaper to be able to start a business than to buy a house,” he pointed out.

Erick Arguello of Calle 24 (formerly the Lower 24th Street Merchants and Neighbors Association) said he’d seen a similar trend along his strip of the Mission, where some Latino-owned businesses have managed to hold strong since they bought their properties years ago.

Nevertheless, Arguello said, the pressure is on. “There’s been an onslaught of realtors and prospectors on 24th Street,” he said. “They ask about the neighbor next door: Do you know when their lease goes to?”

Nor are businesses the only ones impacted. “We’re seeing a lot of evictions of residents along the corridor,” he noted. “The majority of them are Latino families.”

Laura Guzman, executive director of the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, decried a lack of funding for affordable housing and dedicated units for the homeless and impoverished.

She said many individuals living on the streets in the Mission lack options, leading them to pass the time in the BART plaza. “Support the people in the plaza. They’re human beings,” Guzman said.

Nick Pagoulatos, a legislative aid to Sup. Eric Mar who was previously involved with mid-90s anti-gentrification campaigns in the Mission, said he himself wasn’t sure if he would be able to remain in the city.

“I’m a partner to a woman who was born in the Mission,” he said, acknowledging the deep ties her family has to the neighborhood. “We know that when we lose our housing” – it is likely a question of when, not if, Pagoulatos said – “we’re not going to be able to stay in the Mission. And we’re probably not going to be able to stay in San Francisco.”

Some activist efforts have emerged. A direct action group called Eviction Free San Francisco has staged protests outside the doors of real-estate speculators. At the upcoming Dia de los Muertos 2013 celebration, curator Martina Ayala said at the meeting, “We are building altars to remember the life that we once enjoyed.” La Llorona, a Dia de los Muertos exhibit that will be held at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, is subtitled “weeping for the life and death of the Mission District.”

A similar transformation happened 10 years ago when the first dot-com boom flooded the Mission with deep-pocketed residents, Pagoulatos noted. Back then, “there was an organized reaction,” he said. “To be honest with you, we fought the good fight, we were at it for a long time and we didn’t win.”

This time around, “Our level of disgust for what’s been going on has been numbed,” he said. But he called for reaching out to engage unlikely allies, and for tapping into collective anger about displacement to bring about change.

“Get pissed, folks,” Pagoulatos said. “Anger is a good thing, especially in the face of injustice.”

Is the new iPhone fingerprint reader hacked yet?

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 23, 2013

67

Apparently, the answer is yes. Wired is reporting that a German hacker with the European organization Chaos Computer Club has found a way to fake out Apple’s brand new Touch ID fingerprint reader, rolled out as a security feature.

The hacker, who goes by Starbug, demonstrated that the phones can be hacked with replicas of real fingerprints constructed with pink latex milk or woodglue. It isn’t the first time CCC set out to prove the flaws in biometric security systems – a few years ago, the hackers published the image of a fingerprint belonging to a German interior minister who was strongly advocating for new electronic passports that would be linked to individuals’ fingerprints.

A few weeks ago, we reported that San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon and other law enforcement officials had banned together to call on smartphone manufacturers to implement new security features as a way to address growing theft of mobile devices. Apparently, the fingerprint ID systems don’t offer the level of security Apple was hoping for. The latest iPhones, which include fingerprint readers, were just released Sept. 20.

According to the SFPD, more than 50 percent of robberies occurring every day involve smartphones.

Community forum planned on Mission gentrification

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 20, 2013

111

The recent debate about high-end retailer Jack Spade seeking to open up shop in the former location of Adobe Books has placed concerns about gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District to the front burner yet again.

To spark a dialogue about an appropriate community response to the changing fabric of the neighborhood, community activists have organized a discussion forum scheduled for Monday, Sept. 23.

As rents soar, countless longtime businesses and residents are being priced out of the Mission. From the event description:

“How do we, as a community, feel about this? What can we learn from each other as we consider how to confront the issues of a changing neighborhood and city? Coming from our many perspectives, are there matters that some, most, or all of us can agree upon? … What urgent and long-term actions can we take to support existing local businesses and maintain the diversity and unique character of the Mission District? These are just a few of the questions we may discuss at this meeting.”

The meeting will be hosted at the Center for Political Education on Valencia Street, and participants will represent a host of local businesses and community organizations including Calle 24 SF, Eviction Free San Francisco, Encantada Gallery, the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, PODER, Shaping San Francisco and the Valencia Corridor Merchants Association.

The discussion will be moderated by Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW.

The event will be held at 522 Valencia on Monday, Sept. 23 at 6pm and is free to attend.

Corporate welfare booming

Michael Redmond

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September 17, 2013

10

rebecca@sfbg.com

Business tax breaks instituted by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and other corporate-friendly local politicians to stimulate growth in tech, biotech, and cleantech, diverted roughly $14.2 million from city coffers in 2012, records show. That’s a staggering increase from 2011, when the city’s corporate welfare programs amounted to roughly $4.2 million.

The beneficiaries, mostly representing sectors that are enjoying supercharged growth buoyed by venture capital at a time when much of the economy is still foundering in the wake of the Great Recession, qualified for the tax breaks in exchange for doing business in San Francisco or setting up shop in the Central Market/Tenderloin area.

When the latest spate of business tax cuts was launched in early 2011 to keep Twitter here and stimulate economic growth around its headquarters on mid-Market Street, critics took aim at Lee for sapping city resources with needless corporate giveaways. A 2012 New York Times analysis showed that the $22 million Twitter is expected to save over the six-year tax break makes it the largest incentive granted to a company in California, based on data going at least as far back as 2002.

The various payroll-tax exclusions — they’re available for green technology and biotech firms, as well as companies operating in designated “enterprise” zones — waive a 1.5 percent tax on employee compensation expenses. Collectively, the forgone revenues from 2012 reflect taxes not collected on more than $680 million in employee compensation.

With more businesses than ever lining up to take advantage of the handouts, and two additional tax-breaks enacted since 2011, the amount given away has surged. The Treasurer & Tax Collector’s Office submitted the final figures in annual reports to the Board of Supervisors on Sept. 13.

The giveaways included $3.3 million for two companies claiming exclusions for stock-based compensation. In 2011, only Zynga qualified for this stock-based exclusion program, saving $1.5 million in taxes. In 2012, a second company qualified for this break, more than doubling the amount given away as the value of Zynga’s tax break soared.

A Central Market / Tenderloin payroll tax exclusion program waived payroll taxes for 14 businesses operating last year in that neighborhood — a long-impoverished area where tech and venture capital firms have been snapping up commercial office space. While the Central Market tax exclusion resulted in corporate giveaways totaling just $34,000 in 2011, the incentive resulted in about $1.9 million in forgone revenues in 2012.

Meanwhile, about $5.4 million stemmed from programs that didn’t specifically benefit tech firms or mid-Market transplants. There was a payroll-tax exemption crafted to aid small business, and a surplus business tax credit, which distributed $500 to each of the 6,781 businesses that paid the payroll tax.

Speaking onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Sept. 9, Mayor Lee touted the tech sector’s soaring job growth, using an info-graphic to spotlight the city’s 1,892 tech companies and 45,493 jobs that were recently added.

The eye-popping statistics prompted conference host Michael Arrington to query Lee on what is being done for San Franciscans who are finding it increasingly unaffordable to remain in the city. The mayor, who was sitting beside billionaire tech investor Ron Conway, acknowledged that Arrington had “a good point,” and referenced an affordable housing trust fund approved by voters last year.

But at the end of the day, despite the growing imbalance, the current economic climate appears to be the exact effect Lee’s administration had hoped for when it created these corporate welfare programs.

Ilan Moscowitz contributed to this report.

Bay Bridge turns Brown

Michael Redmond

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September 17, 2013

15

The California Senate gave its blessing to the rename the western span of the Bay Bridge after former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown on Sept. 12, blatantly disregarding its own rules and strong local opposition to the proposal.

Since ACR 65 is a nonbinding resolution, Gov. Jerry Brown cannot veto it even though he went on record earlier this week saying the 77-year-old bridge should keep the same name it’s always had.

San Francisco Sens. Mark Leno and Leland Yee both voted in favor of the resolution.

As the Senate gave final approval to the measure, attorneys G. Whitney Leigh and Lee Hepner filed a complaint seeking injunctive relief to overturn the resolution on behalf of their client, good government advocate Bob Planthold.

At a press conference, Planthold said the lawsuit “has nothing to do with Willie,” but rather sought to remedy what he perceived as state lawmakers ignoring their own rules, including reserving such honors for the deceased, a state of affairs he characterized as “Orwellian.”

Leigh questioned why Sacramento legislators were in such a rush to rename part of the Bay Bridge when construction of the eastern span had only just been completed, following long delays and overruns partly caused by Brown when he was mayor.

“There is a shadiness and irregularity to this procedure,” Leigh said.

The suit alleges “arbitrary suspension and/or violation of legislative rules and policies” to fast track the legislation. Specifically, Hepner said, lawmakers ignored an established timeline for introducing new proposals, instead allowing ACR 65 to be submitted four months after the formal deadline.

Formal Assembly criteria states that clear community consensus must be in place when a major piece of public infrastructure is renamed. Yet in the case of the Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge, no such consensus exists.

Leigh is the former law partner of Matt Gonzalez, a former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who joined former board presidents Quentin Kopp and Aaron Peskin to formally call on Senate pro Tem Darrell Steinberg to stop the resolution from going forward.

On Aug. 29, the trio fired off an open letter to Steinberg in an attempt to halt the proposal from going any further, claiming “there exists significant concern in our community that naming the Bay Bridge for him is not appropriate.”

Peskin had a more colorful take on Brown and bridge when he spoke to the Guardian: “I think they should name the old eastern span, that they’re demolishing, after him. You know why? Because it’s old and crooked and a danger to society.”

Legal foes invited to weigh in on healthcare policy

Michael Redmond

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September 17, 2013

4

A few years ago, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association lost a legal battle it waged over the employer mandates in the city’s landmark Health Care Security Ordinance, a universal healthcare program that has provided safety-net services for the city’s uninsured since its passage in 2006, partially through the Healthy San Francisco program.

Composed of San Francisco restaurant owners, GGRA took issue with a mandatory employer spending contribution designed to help employees cover healthcare costs. While the city’s flagship healthcare program ultimately emerged unscathed, the lawsuit went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and consumed city staff time and legal expenses.

Now that the federal Affordable Care Act is poised to begin, with enrollment in low-income programs starting in October, a new debate has surfaced over whether current employer requirements should stay the same under Obamacare. While ardent supporters of HCSO have urged the city not to make any drastic policy changes because the existing system can help low-wage workers take advantage of federally subsidized healthcare options, local business interests have signaled that they think it’s time to scale back employer contributions.

In late August, representatives from the city’s Department of Public Health sent out invitations to various stakeholders to join an advisory body called the Universal Healthcare Council, which will be charged with “reviewing local policies against the backdrop of the federal law.” Despite the failed, messy legal battle that nearly undermined Healthy SF just a few years ago, and the more recent scandals involving restaurants fraudulently using customer surcharges and still stiffing employees (see “Check please,” April 23), an invitation was sent to Rob Black, executive director of GGRA. For the sake of uninsured employees throughout San Francisco, let’s hope the restaurant association doesn’t have another lawsuit up its sleeve.

The case of the missing mural box

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 17, 2013

14

Several observers in the blogosphere have pointed out that a utility box painted by San Francisco muralist Mona Caron was removed without warning, and replaced with a “boring box.”

The public art piece, titled Manifestation Station, featured an optical illusion completing a view of the intersection of Duboce and Church streets with an alternative reality incorporating a garden, a creek, cyclists and mosaic sidewalk art.

When the box was removed, “Mona had no idea where it went, and it took a while – lots of phone calls and emails – to locate it,” reports Hugh D’Andrade, a friend of Caron’s. D’Andrade finally tracked it down at a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency rail yard, at 2502 Alameda Street.

D’Andrade tracked it down and took this photo at the SFMTA yard.

In addition to being flagged on neighborhood blogs, the sudden removal of the box has also attracted the attention of the Duboce Triangle Neighborhood Association. According to an email that was forwarded to the Guardian from DTNA’s David Troup, “Supervisor [Scott] Wiener is aware of the situation and monitoring it.”

According to Paul Rose of the SFMTA, “The controller box was replaced after the completion of the Church & Duboce Rail Replacement project, as part of a system-wide upgrade of various electrical sectionalized switches and associated controller boxes.”

In a note to a community of concerned supporters on Facebook, Caron related the backstory.

It all started when the SFMTA needed to install two new boxes as part a 2012 track improvement project at Church and Duboce. “The community complained of additional sidewalk clutter,” Caron explained, so “under pressure, MTA softened the pill by agreeing to beautify the two new boxes with art.”

At that point, another neighborhood group pushed for including a pre-existing box, at the corner of Church and Duboce, in the beautification project. That’s the one Caron transformed into Manifestation Station, but unfortunately the switches inside it were aging and in need of replacement. “This was a last-minute addition, pushed for by well-meaning, community-oriented people, and nice people at MTA shooed that in,” Caron notes. However, “I repeatedly asked about the projected longevity of that old box, and was reassured.”

Rose said SFMTA did not know that the box would have to be replaced at the time the project was approved. But while he initially told the Guardian that he believed it was the Art Commission that had granted approval for Manifestation Station, it was actually SFMTA. “They basically informed me down the line a ways that there was a third box to paint,” Caron explained.

It didn’t take long before Muni learned (the hard way) that the switches inside the box needed to be replaced. “The switch failed in that location,” Rose told the Guardian in a phone interview. “And that’s when it became evident that they needed to be replaced.”

What Caron had heard about the switch failure was this: “Awhile back, a sectionalizing switch inside it actually blew up, and caused a nine-day mess at that corner affecting J and N train service. I remember seeing the white smoke sediments beneath the box’s vents.”

And that is why Manifestation Station was removed and replaced with “this new, narrower but much taller box,” in Caron’s words. Rose said SFMTA plans on asking Caron to paint it. “We’re going to reach out to the artist,” he said, adding that the agency hopes to address it over the next three months. As for what will become of Manifestation Station, Rose told the Guardian that decision would also be left up to the artist.

If a new utility box creation does manifest at the corner of Church and Duboce, don’t expect a repeat of what was there before. Asked how she might respond if the SFMTA contacts her with this request, Caron said, “I guess I may be willing to in this case – though I won’t redo the same thing. Generally I don’t really want to spend too much time painting boxes. I want to paint walls. I’d love for Muni to have me paint a big wall.”

Corporate welfare boom: SF’s business tax breaks jump to $14.2 million annually

Erica Hanna

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September 16, 2013

116

Corporate welfare boom: SF’s business tax breaks jump to $14.2 million annually

Business tax breaks instituted by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and other corporate-friendly local politicians to stimulate growth in tech, biotech, and cleantech, diverted roughly $14.2 million from city coffers in 2012, records show. That’s a staggering increase from 2011, when the city’s corporate welfare programs amounted to roughly $4.2 million.

The beneficiaries, mostly representing sectors that are enjoying supercharged growth buoyed by venture capital at a time when much of the economy is still floundering in the wake of the Great Recession, qualified for the tax breaks in exchange for doing business in San Francisco or setting up shop in the Central Market/Tenderloin area.

When the latest spate of business tax cuts were launched in early 2011 to keep Twitter in San Francisco and stimulate economic growth around its headquarters on mid-Market Street, critics took aim at Lee for sapping city resources with needless corporate giveaways. A 2012 New York Times analysis showed that the $22 million Twitter is expected to save over the six-year tax break makes it the largest incentive granted to a company in California, based on data going at least as far back as 2002.

The various payroll-tax exclusions — they’re available for green technology and biotech firms, as well as companies operating in designated “enterprise” zones — waive a 1.5 percent tax on employee compensation expenses. Collectively, the forgone revenues from 2012 reflect taxes not collected on more than $680 million in employee compensation.

Since 2011 the amount given away has swelled as even more businesses lined up to take advantage of the handouts, and two additional tax breaks were made. The Treasurer & Tax Collector’s Office submitted the final figures in annual reports to the Board of Supervisors on Sept. 13.

Ed Lee creates jobs in San Francisco. Endorse him for Mayor at http://t.co/7LZZNTGY

— Ron Conway (@RonConway) October 24, 2011

Some of the tech companies receiving tax breaks are investments of venture capitalist Ron Conway, a behind-the-scenes power player with Ed Lee’s ear. Read more of our coverage on Conway here.

The giveaways included $3.3 million for two companies claiming exclusions for stock-based compensation. In 2011, only Zynga qualified for this stock-based exclusion program, saving them $1.5 million in taxes. In 2012, a second company qualified for this break, more than doubling the amount given away as the value of Zynga’s tax break soared.

A Central Market / Tenderloin payroll tax exclusion program waived payroll taxes for 14 businesses operating last year in that neighborhood — a long-impoverished area where tech and venture capital firms have been snapping up commercial office space. While the Central Market tax exclusion resulted in corporate giveaways totaling just $34,000 in 2011, the incentive resulted in about $1.9 million in forgone revenues in 2012.

Meanwhile, about $5.4 million stemmed from programs that didn’t specifically benefit tech firms or mid-Market transplants. There was a payroll-tax exemption crafted to aid small business, and a surplus business tax credit, which distributed $500 to each of the 6,781 businesses that paid the payroll tax.

Speaking onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Sept. 9, Mayor Lee touted the tech sector’s soaring job growth, using an info-graphic to spotlight the city’s 1,892 tech companies and 45,493 jobs that were recently added.

The eye-popping statistics prompted conference host Michael Arrington to query Lee on what is being done for San Franciscans who are finding it increasingly unaffordable to remain in the city. The mayor, who was sitting beside billionaire tech investor Ron Conway, acknowledged that Arrington had “a good point,” and referenced an affordable housing trust fund approved by voters last year.

But at the end of the day, despite the growing imbalance, the current economic climate appears to be the exact effect Lee’s administration had hoped for when it created these corporate welfare programs.

Ilan Moscowitz contributed to this report.

This report has been corrected from an earlier version.

How far will $10 an hour stretch in 2016?

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 13, 2013

112

Earlier this week, just as media reports pointed out that America’s wealthiest 1 percent did better in 2012 than almost any other year in history, Gov. Jerry Brown came out in favor of a bill that would raise the state minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2016.

Last night, the Assembly approved the bill on a 51-25 vote, sending it onto the governor’s office. The development is almost certain to provoke howls from pro-business interests claiming it will wreak havoc on the economy. But what will it mean for minimum wage earners, whose take-home pay currently totals less than $300 a week for a full-time job?

Here are some statistics to put into perspective what it means to be a minimum wage earner in a world of rising costs and a widening gulf between top income earners and the rest.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition notes that a household must earn $25.78 per hour to afford fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment without spending 30 percent of their income. Couples earning California’s current $8 minimum wage can muster only a combined $16 an hour before taxes.

Based on this map illustrating San Francisco’s gaping rent affordability gap, a minimum-wage earner (making the 2012 minimum wage of $10.24 an hour) would have to hold down at least 3.4 full-time jobs to rent a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rate – even in the city’s less expensive areas like the Bayview or the Excelsior.

Fast food workers around the country are aiming higher than the $10 per hour Californians may have to look forward to by 2016 – organized food service employees have been rallying to be paid $15 an hour, a rate they see as an actual livable wage. According to this nifty calculator created by the Daily Beast, using data from University of Massachusetts economists Jeanette Wicks-Lim and Robert Pollin, the cost of paying McDonald’s workers this much could be recovered by charging 22 cents more for a Big Mac.

Finally, it’s worth considering the growing wealth gap between the wealthiest one percent and the rest. From 2007 to 2009, average real income for the bottom 99 percent fell by 11.6 percent, the largest two-year decline since the Great Depression, according to to an analysis by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent lost an even higher percentage in that time. But then, during the economic recovery from 2009 to 2011, the one percent saw their incomes increase by 11.2 percent, while incomes of the bottom 99 percent shrunk slightly. Then, in 2012, the top one percent scored a 19 percent increase, their collective earnings accounting for 22.5 percent of total U.S. income. As Matthew O’Brien writes in The Atlantic, “it’s the one percent’s economy, and we’re just living in it.”

Senate OKs Bay Bridge name change, lawsuit seeks to overturn it

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 12, 2013

28

The California Senate gave its blessing to the rename the western span of the Bay Bridge after former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown on Sept. 12, blatantly disregarding mounting local opposition to the proposal. Since ACR 65 is a nonbinding resolution, Gov. Jerry Brown cannot veto it even though he went on record earlier this week saying the 77-year-old bridge should keep the same name it’s always had.

San Francisco Sens. Mark Leno and Leland Yee both voted in favor of the resolution.

The same day, Attorneys G. Whitney Leigh and Lee Hepner filed a complaint seeking injunctive relief to overturn the resolution on behalf of their client, good government advocate Bob Planthold.

At a press conference, Planthold said the lawsuit “has nothing to do with Willie,” but rather sought to remedy what he perceived as state lawmakers ignoring their own rules, a state of affairs he characterized as “Orwellian.” Here’s an excerpt of his comments to reporters:

For his part, Leigh questioned why Sacramento legislators were in such a rush to rename part of the Bay Bridge when construction of the eastern span had only just been completed, following long delays and overruns. “There is a shadiness and irregularity to this procedure,” he said.

The suit, directed at the California Senate and the Assembly and all the lawmakers responsible for pushing it through, alleges “arbitrary suspension and/or violation of legislative rules and policies” to fast track the legislation.

Specifically, Hepner said, lawmakers ignored an established timeline for introducing new proposals, instead allowing ACR 65 to be submitted four months after the formal deadline. Additionally, he said, the Senate Committee on Transportation and Housing was technically barred from meeting between Sept. 3 and 13 – a rule likely meant to keep lawmakers focused on more pressing issues, like approving 400+ bills before a Sept. 13 deadline – but nevertheless, ACR 65 passed out of that committee on Sept. 9 on an 8-1 vote.

Planthold previously served on the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force and was previously an officer on the San Francisco Ethics Commission. Leigh is the former law partner of Matt Gonzalez, a former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who joined two other former board presidents to formally call on Senate pro Tem Darrell Steinberg to stop the resolution from going forward.

Despite Gov. Brown’s opposition to renaming the Bay Bridge, it remains unclear exactly what he’ll do about it now that it has formally passed. In response to a query about whether he would take steps to halt implementation, spokesperson Evan Westrup responded in an email: “Got your message. Don’t expect we’ll be providing further comment today.”

Proposal to rename Bay Bridge draws controversy

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 11, 2013

50

The proposal to rename the western span of the Bay Bridge after former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown is generating more controversy as it hurtles through the approval process in Sacramento, where lawmakers are staring down a Sept. 13 deadline before the legislative session ends.

Gov. Jerry Brown has expressed opposition to the idea, and the proposed name change prompted yet another scathing editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle. Former Mayor Brown, who also served as Assembly Speaker, publishes a weekly column in the Chronicle.

Chronicle columnists Matier and Ross reported Sept. 10 that Gov. Brown had met with Alice Huffman, a key supporter of the proposal and president of the California NAACP, about the proposed name change.

The partial renaming of the 77-year-old Bay Bridge has seen very little opposition in the state legislature, and backing from the NAACP might be a key reason why there has been such broad support from lawmakers. As it happens, Huffman has long been described as a friend of Willie Brown’s – she briefly worked for him when he was Assembly Speaker and later served as a political advisor, according to Los Angeles Times coverage.

Assembly Member Tom Ammiano opted to stay out of the fray and abstained from voting, a decision his spokesperson Carlos Alcalá explained by saying, “he’s hesitant to vote against it, because of course Willie Brown was a very important figure” in the California Legislature.

At the same time, Alcalá said Ammiano couldn’t support renaming the bridge, because “it has significant opposition,” and “he thought it was inappropriate to name it after a living person.”

Formal Assembly criteria states that clear community consensus must be in place when a major piece of public infrastructure is renamed. Yet in the case of the Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge, no such consensus exists.

On Aug. 29, former Board of Supervisors presidents Matt Gonzalez, Aaron Peskin and Quentin Kopp fired off an open letter to Senate pro Tem Darrell Steinberg in an attempt to halt the proposal from going any further. They urged him not to hear the resolution in the Senate Rules Committee, because the proposal appeared to conflict with Senate rules and “there exists significant concern in our community that naming the Bay Bridge for him is not appropriate.”

So far, the former elected officials haven’t gotten much in the way of a response.

“The state Senate has always been a club, and all those elected officials hope that someday things will be named after them,” Peskin told the Guardian. “I think they should name the old eastern span, that they’re demolishing, after him,” he added with a chuckle. “You know why? Because it’s old and crooked and a danger to society.”

Alerts

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2013

0

ALERTS

Wednesday 11

Vandana Shiva on biotechnology Goldman Theater, David Brower Center, 2150 Allston, Berk. www.kpfa.org. 7:30pm, free. Join world-renowned environmental philosopher and author Vandana Shiva for a forum on the biotechnology industry. Shiva will illuminate the corporate assault on biological and cultural diversity, in conversation with Gopal Dayaneni of Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project. She’ll help concerned activists to connect the dots: What is the East Bay “Green Corridor,” who’s behind it, and what are the implications for communities here and around the globe?

Friday 13

Oil and unions in Iraq SEIU 1021 office, 350 Rhode Island, SF. 1021.seiu.org. 6:30pm, free. Listen as Hassan Juma’a Awad, president of the Iraq Federation of Oil Unions, shares his experience in struggling for basic labor rights for Iraqi workers. Iraq’s public sector workers (including the oil sector) lack the legal right to organize or engage in collective bargaining, more than a decade after the end of the dictatorship. Earlier this year, Hassan faced criminal charges in retaliation for worker strikes, and was accused of undermining Iraq’s economy.

Saturday 14

North by Northwest bike ride Velo Rouge Cafe, 798 Arguello, SF. 1:30pm, free. Interested in street design, bikeways, traffic calming, and other kinds of improvements along San Francisco city streets? Join a group of cyclists on this afternoon ride to learn about the history and current projects that shape the streets on which we walk and bike. This ride will feature a series of stops and information about how the 2009 Bike Plan and other ongoing projects are shaping the northwestern parts of San Francisco.

Monday 16

Mexican Independence Day 2940 16th St., SF. Livingwage-sf.org. 7pm, $10–$15. Join the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition for a concert and celebration of Mexican Independence Day. “Songs of Healing for Juarez” will provide an emergency benefit concert for Las Hormigas, an organization that has been working to address violence and poverty in Ciudad Juarez. The concert will feature Diana Gameros, Francisco Herrera and other guests, as well as a live art auction. For more information, call (415) 863-1225.

Jill Stein on movements vs. money Unite Here Local 2, 209 Golden Gate, SF. 6-9pm, free. Jill Stein, the Green Party Presidential Candidate of 2012, will discuss the creation and intent of The Green Shadow Cabinet, an organization that includes nearly 100 prominent community and labor leaders, physicians, cultural workers, veterans and others with the goal of providing an ongoing opposition and alternative voice to dysfunctional Washington, DC politics. Stein will speak on current political dynamics and strategies for creating good jobs, ending student debt, cultivating democracy and breathing new life into the environmental movement. Hosted by OccupyForum.

Shit happened

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2013

5

Exploratorium layoffs raise questions

A round of recent layoffs at the Exploratorium in San Francisco has taken the museum staff by surprise and sparked questions about the institution’s focus, an unexpected turn of events on the heels of the institution’s splashy reopening at its refurbished 330,000 square foot facility along The Embarcadero.

In mid-August, just a few months after the Exploratorium opened the doors at Piers 15/17, some 80 full-time-equivalent positions were eliminated without warning. The cuts included 35 layoffs, 35 positions that went unfilled, and eight reductions from full time to part time, according to spokesperson Leslie Patterson, a 14-year Exploratorium employee who was among those affected. The total staff is composed of 290 full-time-equivalent positions, according to its website.

Roughly three quarters of the impacted staff members are represented by SEIU Local 1021, and union members are now gearing up to launch a social media campaign in response to the sudden staffing cuts, featuring the community-minded vision of founder Frank Oppenheimer, with the hashtag #ourcommunitymuseum.

Officially, the cuts were made to solve a budget shortfall created when attendance at the new facility failed to reach anticipated levels. “They had very, very aggressive projections for attendance,” noted Eric Socolofsky, an exhibit developer who has been representing unionized museum staff at the negotiating table.

“We worked so hard to get in these doors and open this place,” Socolofsky said of the new waterfront spot. “People have given so much,” but in the weeks since layoff notices were issued without warning, “there’s a lot of disillusionment.”

Patterson emphasized that “our crowds have grown” since the new facility opened, despite the uncertain financial picture. June attendance was triple that of June in the previous year, she said, but the overall attendance figures still failed to hit necessary targets. “We needed to reduce the workforce to offset a budget gap,” she said.

Yet several museum employees told the Guardian that there is more to the sudden staff reduction than just solving a simple budget gap. There appears to be a reorganization effort afoot to promote business development, Socolofsky said, and that has some staff members concerned about a shift in priorities that could detract from efforts geared particularly for Bay Area patrons.

Socolofsky said more energy had been going toward “client services,” or contracting with outside institutions to build exhibits, and rent or sell portable exhibits developed at the Exploratorium. And even as the layoff notices have been issued, the Exploratorium is hiring for a dozen or so new positions.

“One of our concerns is that it’s moving toward a profit model,” Socolofsky said, adding that it was his understanding that some positions had been eliminated because they did not fit into the new organizational structure.

Its board of directors includes representatives from prominent businesses including Google, Twitter, eBay, Bechtel, Disney, PG&E, and a host of prominent venture capital firms with investments in the tech sector. Exploratorium Board Chairman George Cogan is a director at Bain & Company, Inc., a firm that specializes in restructuring, which gained notoriety during the 2012 presidential election due to GOP candidate Mitt Romney’s history of involvement there.

“It just seems like the pendulum has swung more toward the business aspect,” said David Barker, a graphic designer with the Exploratorium’s Institutional Media Group who was forced into an early retirement as a consequence of the staffing cuts.

Pamela Winfrey, a senior artist who started working at the museum in 1979 and just had her hours scaled back, said the Exploratorium has always felt like a family. “I think there are new directions in the wind as well as a budget shortfall,” Winfrey said. “It’s a complicated picture.”

And across the board, she added, the Exploratorium must contend with the fact that there’s a steadily eroding pool of funding for arts and science. “Funders are really having to think about whether they want to feed starving children,” she said, “or feed the mind.” (Rebecca Bowe)

Prisoners end hunger strike

Bay Area legislators Tom Ammiano (D-SF) and Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) — who chair the Assembly and Senate Public Safety Committees, respectively — played pivotal roles in the Sept. 5 decision by California prison inmates to end their hunger strike (see “Hungry for reform, July 3) after 60 days.

The legislators called for legislative hearings to consider implementing some of the reforms that the prisoners and their supporters have been calling for, including changes to solitary confinement policies that critics say amount to illegal torture under international law.

“I’m happy that no one had to die in order to bring attention to these conditions,” Ammiano said. “The prisoners’ decision to take meals should be a relief to CDCR and the Brown administration, as well as to those who support the strikers.”

The question now is whether the legislative hearings, set for next month, can persuade the executive branch to finally take action, despite the fact that both Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have taken a hard line on prison issues, even resisting federal court orders to reduce the population in the severely overcrowded prison system and to improve substandard health care.

Ammiano spokesperson Carlos Alcala told the Guardian that the end of the hunger strike could help end that stalemate: “Mr. Ammiano is hopeful that CDCR’s intransigence has been directed at negotiating under the hunger strike pressure, but that they will now be open to making some changes that are meaningful.”

CRCR head Jeffrey Beard issued a public statement saying, “We are pleased this dangerous strike has been called off before any inmates became seriously ill.”

Issac Ontiveros of the Oakland-based California Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity group said the hunger strike generated international attention and support, waking the public up to horrific conditions in the prisons and putting pressure on the CDCR to implement reforms.

“Their demands are legitimate and they are pointing out human rights violations in California’s prisons,” Ontiveros told the Guardian, noting that Amnesty International and a long list of other groups are putting pressure on California to reform its prison practices. “What made them call off the strike was the political gains that they made…It was a thoughtful civil rights strategy.” (Steven T. Jones)

SFPD handling of cyclist fatalities probed

In the wake of revelations of shoddy and insensitive police work related to the Aug. 14 death of 24-year-old bicyclist Amelie Le Moullac, who was run over by a commercial truck driver who turned right across her path as she rode in a bike lane on Folsom Street at Sixth Street, Sup. Jane Kim has called for a hearing on how the SFPD investigates cyclist fatalities.

The issue has lit up the Bay Guardian website with hundreds of reader comments after we wrote a series of blog posts and an editorial (“Anti-cyclist bias must stop,” Aug. 28), revealing that SFPD failed to obtain video of the crash even as its Sgt. Richard Ernst showed up at an Aug. 21 memorial to Le Moullac to denigrate cyclists and make unfounded statements about the fatal collision.

Police Chief Greg Suhr later apologized for Ernst’s behavior and the flawed investigation and said that surveillance video unearthed by cycling activists led to the conclusion by a police investigation that the driver who killed Le Moullac was at fault, according to Bay City News and SF Appeal, which also reported on Kim’s call for a hearing. “We’re really thankful to Jane for bringing this forward,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Director Leah Shahum told the Guardian, saying she hopes the hearing results in changes to how the SFPD investigates cyclist fatalities. “We want to make sure there is ongoing accountability.” Meanwhile, as the San Francisco Examiner reported Sept. 5, Le Moullac’s family has filed a civil lawsuit against the driver who killed her, Gilberto Oriheaula Alcantar, as well as the company that he was driving for, Daylight Foods Inc., alleging that he was negligent in driving too fast and failing to pull into the bike lane before making a right turn from Folsom onto Sixth Street. (Steven T. Jones)

Where’s my car?

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2013

8

By Rebecca Bowe

rebecca@sfbg.com

There’s a great scene in The Big Lebowski that my friend reminded me of when I lamented that the San Francisco Police Department didn’t seem to care that my car had been stolen.

Of course they don’t, silly, this friend responded with a hearty laugh. It’s like when The Dude asks a Los Angeles cop whether there are any “leads” on the whereabouts of his stolen car (along with the briefcase full of money inside).

“I’ll just check with the boys down at the crime lab,” the cop responds, a grin spreading across his face. “They’ve got four more detectives working on the case. They’ve got us working in shifts!” Then he bursts into peals of laughter.

When a San Francisco police officer arrived to take a report three hours after my initial call reporting a stolen vehicle, he seemed sympathetic. And he was totally honest: “We’re not going to look for it,” he assured me. “But we’ll let you know if we find it.”

Fair enough, I thought. It was a Saturday night in San Francisco. The SFPD probably had bigger problems on its hands, like shootings or armed robberies or naked acrobats. Clearly, the last thing SFPD was going to focus on was ferreting out my poor little mid-’90s Honda Civic.

Car theft, it turns out, is extremely common in San Francisco. Crime stats provided by SFPD show that from March 1 to Aug. 31 of 2013, a grand total of 2,784 cars were either stolen or almost stolen in San Francisco (the stats include attempted theft). The Ingleside District was the most heavily impacted, while the Mission and the Bayview weren’t far behind.

Why do people drive off with other people’s cars? “Suspects that steal cars have used them for other crimes,” SFPD spokesperson Gordon Shyy explained. “There are also suspects that steal cars simply to ‘joy ride.'”

Another lesson learned the hard way: If you think your car will not be stolen just because it looks like crap, you are mistaken. Shyy said that, nationwide, Hondas made in the 1990s are the most stolen vehicles.

“The reason being that the ignition is worn out over time, and a shaved key or other similar apparatus can be used to start the vehicle easily,” he explained.

Becoming a victim of car theft was an eye-opening experience. For one, it appears that the closed circuit cameras blanketing my neighborhood were basically functioning as seagull perches, taken out of commission the day before for maintenance. So those expensive-looking security cameras served neither as a deterrent for car theft, nor a crime-fighting tool. At least I can rest easy in the knowledge that Big Brother has not, in fact, been recording my every movement.

SFPD stats show just 139 vehicles were stolen and recovered from March 1 to Aug. 31, roughly 5 percent of the total stolen (or almost stolen) in the same time frame. I got lucky, mine was recovered.

SFPD gave me just 20 minutes to retrieve it before calling for a tow truck, notifying me that my Honda had been located as I was on Muni. Looking for an exercise in futility? Promise that you’ll be somewhere in 20 minutes, and then rely on Muni to get there.

But here’s where faith in humanity was restored. Not only did the officers agree to accommodate me by staying put until I could get there, but a random fellow bus passenger — by the name of Carma (for real!) — offered me a lift.

And just as I got to the place where my Civic had been found, a neighbor who lived in an apartment just above the street popped his head out the window to ask if it was my car. I told him it was, and he said it had been sitting there abandoned for days, so he’d phoned the police. Lesson learned: Forget surveillance cameras. If your car gets stolen, just hope somebody out there is paying attention.

Questions raised by staff cutbacks at the Exploratorium

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 5, 2013

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A round of recent layoffs at the Exploratorium in San Francisco has taken museum staff by surprise and sparked questions about the institution’s focus going forward, an unexpected turn of events on the heels of the institution’s splashy reopening at its refurbished 330,000 square foot facility along The Embarcadero.

In mid-August, just a few months after the Exploratorium opened the doors of its LEED-certified space at Piers 15/17, some 80 full-time-equivalent positions were eliminated without prior warning. The cuts included 35 layoffs, 35 positions that went unfilled, and eight reductions from full time to part time, according to spokesperson Leslie Patterson, a 14-year Exploratorium employee who was among those affected. The total staff is comprised of 290 full-time-equivalent positions, according to its website.

Roughly three quarters of the impacted staff members are represented by SEIU Local 1021, and union members are now gearing up to launch a social media campaign in response to the sudden staffing cuts. They’ve created a graphic depicting founder Frank Oppenheimer (above), and are posting to Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #ourcommunitymuseum.

Officially, the cuts were made to solve for a budget shortfall created when attendance at the new facility failed to reach anticipated levels, making actual revenues lower than what consultants had projected. “They had very, very aggressive projections for attendance,” noted Eric Socolofsky, an exhibit developer who has been representing unionized museum staff at the negotiating table.

“We worked so hard to get in these doors and open this place,” Socolofsky said of the new waterfront spot. “People have given so much,” but in the weeks since layoff notices were issued without warning, “there’s a lot of disillusionment.”

Yet Patterson, the museum spokesperson, emphasized that “our crowds have grown” since the new facility opened, despite the uncertain financial picture. June attendance was triple that of June in the previous year, she said, but the overall attendance figures still failed to hit necessary targets. “We needed to reduce the workforce to offset a budget gap,” she said.

Revenue generated by museum visitors is separate from the money raised to relocate the Exploratorium from its previous home at the Palace of Fine Arts. That effort was bankrolled by a capital campaign, which has collected $290 million of its $300 million goal so far, according to Patterson.

Meanwhile, several museum employees expressed to the Guardian that there is more to the sudden staff reduction than just solving a simple budget gap. There appears to be a reorganization effort afoot to promote business development, Socolofsky said, and that has some staff members concerned about a shift in priorities that could detract from efforts geared particularly for Bay Area patrons.

Socolofsky said more energy had been going toward “client services,” or contracting with outside institutions to build exhibits, and rent or sell portable exhibits developed at the Exploratorium.

And even as the layoff notices have been issued, the Exploratorium is hiring for a dozen or so new positions. “Whatever positions are available are being opened to people who were laid off,” Patterson said. But when asked how the museum could possibly afford be hiring at a time when it was cutting staff to balance the budget, she said she didn’t know the answer.

“One of our concerns is that it’s moving toward a profit model,” Socolofsky said, adding that it was his understanding that some positions had been eliminated because they did not fit into the new organizational structure.

In some ways, it seems odd that the celebrated 44-year-old institution, which lists its budget online as $58.6 million for 2012-13, would be facing financial problems. Its board of directors includes representatives from prominent businesses including Google, Twitter, eBay, Bechtel, Disney, PG&E, and a host of prominent venture capital firms with investments in the tech sector. Amid speculation that the museum could be changing course, some observers have hinged on the fact that Exploratorium Board Chairman George Cogan is a director at Bain & Company, Inc., a firm that specializes in restructuring, which gained notoriety during the 2012 presidential election due to GOP candidate Mitt Romney’s history of involvement there.

David Barker, a graphic designer with the Exploratorium’s Institutional Media Group who was forced into an early retirement as a consequence of the staffing cuts, echoed Socolofsky’s assessment that a reorganization effort seemed to be driving staffing cuts in part. But at the same time, he said the museum had to do something to adapt to a new climate in which funding sources are drying up.

“It just seems like the pendulum has swung more toward the business aspect,” he said. An employee for more than 30 years, Barker lamented that the staffing cuts could dampen mentorship opportunities for younger artists and designers.

Barker was dismissive of the idea that the reorganization was somehow linked to Cogan’s role at Bain & Co., saying, “There’s no person who is more dedicated to the museum.”

Amid the unanswered questions, impacted and unaffected staff members alike emphasized in interviews with the Guardian that the Exploratorium staff continued to feel like a kind of family. “I think it’s kind of extraordinary,” said Pamela Winfrey, a senior artist who started working at the museum in 1979 and just had her hours scaled back. “I think there are new directions in the wind as well as a budget shortfall,” Winfrey said. “It’s a complicated picture.”

And across the board, she added, the Exploratorium must contend with the fact that there’s a steadily eroding pool of funding for arts and science. “Funders are really having to think about whether they want to feed starving children,” she said, “or feed the mind.”

The Rim Fire and climate change

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 4, 2013

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The monstrous blaze that swept through Yosemite and burned 237,841 acres was a record breaker. According to the latest statistics from Cal Fire, the Rim Fire was the fourth highest in the history of California, with a $77 million price tag. Thanks to the efforts of more than 4,000 firefighters and support personnel, the blaze was 80 percent contained as of the latest update on Sept. 4.

While the exact cause remains a mystery for now, it’s worth pointing out that the Rim Fire could not have reached such epic proportions if it hadn’t been for the dry conditions in place when the smoldering began. And as climate change continues to alter weather patterns across the Western United States, projected declines in precipitation and higher average temperatures will lead to more of the same conditions that give rise to hot destructive infernos.

Daniel Berlant, an information officer with Cal Fire, noted in a recent telephone interview that summers have been longer and hotter over the past decade, a trend that has coincided with a spike in wildfires.

According to Cal Fire statistics, there were 5,135 fires in California from January 1 through August 31 of this year. Over the same time span last year, there were 3,731 fires recorded. The five-year average is even lower, at 3,638.

Another troubling statistic: Seven out of the 10 largest wildfires in California history occurred in the last decade alone.

“What we’ve been seeing here in this past decade is longer summers – seven to eight days longer than normal,” Berlant explained. “There’s a correlation between a longer summer and more wildfires,” he continued, and when rainfall finally does arrive, it comes in at record lows, Berlant explained. Meanwhile, “The high temperatures evaporate more of the rain.”

Brush and vegetation that take in moisture from rainfall have a better chance at withstanding a fiery blaze, Berlant noted, but when things stay bone dry, the plants act as kindling that causes the blaze to burn hotter.

So as climate change continues to transform the natural landscapes of the West, costly raging wildfires might be what Californians have to look forward to. Find that depressing? Here’s a captivating YouTube time-lapse video to distract you.