Sarah Phelan Archives — Page 15 of 19 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Selling the park

June 24, 2009

sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Considering that it exists just a short hop from the industrial grind of Third Street, Candlestick Point State Recreation Area is a surprisingly wild and peaceful 150-acre bayshore park.

On a recent afternoon, a man practiced his golf swings, a group fished off a pier, and a lizard darted across a trail and into a clump of wildflowers, all apparently unaware of the storm gathering around the future of this waterfront habitat.

State Sen. Mark Leno’s Senate Bill 792 would give the State Lands Commission and State Parks Department the authority to negotiate an exchange of 42 acres in the park for patches of land on the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, allowing Lennar Corp. to build condos in the state park and reducing Bayview’s only major open space by 25 percent.

Leno claims that SB 792 "will help realize one of the few remaining opportunities for large-scale affordable housing, parks, open space, and economic development in San Francisco by authorizing a key public-private land exchange necessary for the development of Hunters Point/Candlestick Park."

"A lot of this property is dirt, and much of it is used by the 49ers for parking. It’s not high quality park land," Leno told the Guardian.

In addition to adding some amendments suggested by the Sierra Club, Leno said state and federal agencies must approve the deal, which would also require a full environmental impact report. "There will be no environmental shortcutting," Leno said.

But environmental advocates are outraged that Mayor Gavin Newsom and his chief economic advisor, Michael Cohen, are trying to get state legislators to facilitate an unpopular land swap that allows an out-of-state developer to build thousands of condos on state tidelands in exchange for strips and pockets of the toxic shipyard (see "Eliminating dissent," 6/17).

"When Michael Cohen asked us to endorse what they were calling a conceptual framework, he called it a rush to the starting line and promised us a full and robust discussion of the actual proposal," Kristine Enea, who works for the India Basin Neighborhood Association, said of last year’s Proposition G. "We’re not trying to stop the development, but we want a discussion. And we’re raising questions that otherwise won’t be raised until after the environmental impact report is completed."

In April, Newsom wrote to Sen. Fran Pavley, who chairs the state’s Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water, claiming that plans for the shipyard and Candlestick Point had already been endorsed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and overwhelmingly approved by voters in June 2008.

"By utilizing a true public-private partnership, this [SB 792] will cause tens of millions of dollars of public open space investment to state park lands and public trust lands, at no cost to the state or the city’s general fund, providing a significant benefit to the state as well as to the citizens of San Francisco," Newsom wrote.

As part of the land swap, Lennar would pay fair market value for much of the parkland, with estimates of about $40 million that would go to the state for managing the remaining acreage. Lennar proposes to build 7,850 housing units on Candlestick Point, and it’s unclear how many of those will go into what is now a state park.

Critics say Newsom is trying to use Prop. G like a hammer to force through legislation that wouldn’t pass locally and would destroy the park’s current functions and wildlife habitat, forever changing life in Bayview Hunters Point, due to the scale and socioeconomic and environmental impacts of Lennar’s proposed redevelopment.

Created by the legislature in 1977, CPSRA is the state’s first urban park. It offers panoramic views of the wind-whipped bay, San Bruno Mountain, and Yosemite Slough, the only unbridged waterway in the city’s southeast sector. And while it’s not typically crowded, the park is well-used by residents, who like to hike and jog, walk their dogs, and windsurf adjacent to Monster Park stadium.

Saul Bloom — whose nonprofit group, Arc Ecology, angered Cohen and Newsom in February when it published "Alternatives for Study," a draft report that identified deficiencies in Lennar’s current proposal — admits that a section of the park is a weed-filled lot that 49ers fans use for parking on game days.

"But the leasing for parking contributes $800,000 toward park maintenance annually," Bloom told the Guardian, noting that this is a vital source of funding in tough times.

He also noted that the California State Parks Foundation recently raised $12 million to restore Yosemite Slough and the California Solid Waste Management Board (whose members include former Sen. Carole Migden, whom Leno defeated last year) recently completed a $1 million rehabilitation of a former construction debris field on the state park property.

But neither this nor the state Budget Conference Committee’s recent decision to institute a $15 surcharge on vehicle license fees of noncommercial vehicles as a dedicated funding source to keep California’s state parks open will save CPSRA from being hobbled if SB 792 is approved in its current state.

"Surely other land can be used for building condos. Affordable housing and condo residents need open space too," said Peter Barstow, founding director of Nature in the City, noting that the 42-acre parcel of contested land represents 25 percent of the park, but only 5 percent of the 770 acres the developer has at its disposal to build 10,500 units of proposed housing.

"Any loss in acreage would seriously diminish the ability of the park to serve the city’s needs, especially with 10,500 new units proposed for the Lennar development," Barstow said.

He said some "logical swapping" is possible. "But they are doing some numbers game, in which they are counting a huge amount of parkland that is already there."

"We should be thinking how to connect these ecologically isolated islands," Barstow said, who sees this debate as an opportunity to link CPSRA to wildlife corridors in McClaren Park and Bayview Hill. "The development should be in the interest of the people, critters, wildlife and plants in the Bayview, not in those of someone in an office thousands of miles away."

He also scoffed at proponents’ arguments that the density of the development means that it is smart urban growth. "Just because a development is dense is not an argument to build it on a park."

Cohen recently told the Guardian that the 77 acres of the 49ers stadium and all the paid parking inside its facility will be filled with "mainly retail and entertainment," while the 42 acres of state park would be used to build condos.

Meredith Thomas of the Neighborhood Parks Council noted that her group "fully supports the revitalization and redevelopment of the Candlestick Point/Shipyard area … But when folks voted for Prop. G in June 2008, nowhere did the measure say that by voting for it, you are agreeing to sell parkland."

"We are always concerned when municipal land that is being used as a park is put up for sale," Thomas said. "While it’s a state park, it really functions as a neighborhood park for those who use it. I think what happens when we plan for large developments is that we don’t do enough to plan for parks with the density increase that’s coming."

The Sierra Club has been leading the charge against the bill. "We lose 40 acres but gain a bathroom," Arthur Feinstein, the Sierra Club’s local representative jokingly told the Guardian. "Now that’s a good deal!"

Observing that the organization’s position is "no net loss of acreage, no loss of biodiversity, no loss of wildlife corridors," Feinstein said, "There are a ton of alternatives to this plan and no reason to destroy 25 percent of the park or build a bridge and a road over Yosemite Slough."

With Arc’s studies showing that the bridge, which will cost $100 million to construct, only shaves two minutes off travel time, Feinstein added: "This is a road to nowhere. It’ll cost $50 million a minute."

He also said that allowing a company to buy state parkland "sets a terrible precedent… Then every state park is at risk from developers as the state’s budget woes grow. I hope Sen. Mark Leno sees this."

"No one would ever think put housing on Crissy Field," Feinstein continued. "But in the Bayview, the attitude is, why not? That whole mentality has made the area into an environmental justice community. Even when it’s given something, it comes in a costly way to the community, but a cheap way for the developers."

Eliminating dissent

June 17, 2009

sarah@sfbg.com

For years, the Hunters Point Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board has served as the Bayview-Hunters Point community’s main voice in the U.S. Navy’s environmental cleanup plans for the toxic former naval station. But the committee is suddenly being disbanded just as the cleanup enters a crucial phase.

Used for shipbuilding and submarine maintenance and repair, and the decontamination, storage, and disposal of radioactive and atomic weapons testing materials, the shipyard was added to the Superfund national toxic site cleanup list in 1989. But it is also at the heart of where Mayor Gavin Newsom has partnered with Lennar Corp. on the city’s biggest development proposal, involving 10,500 homes and a new stadium for the 49ers.

As the Navy prepares to release a series of important studies and reports concerning the cleanup of the dirtiest parcels on the former shipyard, community members were outraged by the Navy’s announcement in late May that it is preparing to dissolve the RAB in the next 30 days.

In July the Navy will release draft feasibility studies for the cleanup of Parcel E, along with a final remedial investigation/feasibility study for Parcel E2, the dirtiest parcel on the base, and a radiological data-gathering investigation in the sediment surrounding Parcel F, which is the underwater portion of the base.

Some insiders say the announcement was not unexpected, given an escautf8g series of confrontational RAB meetings with the Navy over the last two years. But they fear the community will lose its ability to give the Navy direct, timely, and meaningful feedback, even if many believe the Navy wasn’t listening.

"The Navy fully supports the need for open, meaningful dialogue with the diverse Bayview-Hunters Point community regarding our environmental cleanup actions and decisions. However, the RAB is not fulfilling this objective," the Navy’s Laura Duchnak wrote in a May 22 letter to the RAB.

In her letter, Duchnak said the RAB meetings no longer provide community input on the Navy’s environmental cleanup program, that their atmosphere is not productive to effective public discourse, and that Navy attempts to improve the process have failed. "The revised community involvement program may include community environmental forums, including using Internet-based technologies to more easily reach a diverse audience, expanded monthly progress reports and fact sheets, and hosting technical discussions and tours of cleanup sites for interested community members," Duchnak wrote.

Duchnak’s announcement followed a tense January meeting in which RAB members reacted with horror when the Navy announced it was moving forward with controversial plans to cap radiologically-affected areas on the shipyard’s Parcel B instead of digging and hauling them, which the community preferred (see "Nuclear Fallout," 07/16/08).

Led by RAB co-chair Leon Muhammad, who teaches at the Nation of Islam’s Center for Self Improvement, which has been repeatedly dusted by unmonitored asbestos (see "The corporation that ate San Francisco," 03/17/07), and joined by newly sworn-in members Archbishop King, Marie Harrison, and Daniel Landry, the board voted to seek a civil grand jury investigation into whether local truckers are getting their fair share of the Navy’s shipyard contracts.

Members then voted to remove the city’s public health representative Amy Brownell from the RAB, and to call for the stoppage of all work on the yard until the Department of Defense, the Navy, and the city can prove, as Muhammad said, "where the ongoing dust exceedences are coming from."

The final straw, insiders say, occurred in February when members voted to remove the Navy’s RAB co-chair Keith Forman from the advisory board. Eric Smith, who was sworn onto the RAB in January but did not vote to remove Brownell and Forman, said the Navy’s dissolution response wasn’t surprising.

"The dissolution of RAB is not a good thing in terms of what it is supposed to do. But it was also doing things that were dysfunctional," Smith said. "The bitter irony is that the folks who caused the trouble were trying to get the Navy to sit up and take notice."

Smith said there is frustration with the Navy’s communication style, which the community feels is patronizing. "But the RAB was naïve to think the Navy would allow a forum over which it has unilateral authority to become a platform for attacks," Smith said.

RAB member Kristine Enea, who missed the RAB’s last two meetings, confirmed that the atmosphere got increasingly confrontational but added that the Navy ignored suggestions her calls for wider community involvement.

"It’s ironic that the Navy had decided to respond to criticisms, which include the charge that it is a poor communicator, by cutting off communications with the community," said Enea, who works at the India Basin Neighborhood Association. "Dissolving the RAB is a drastic step. There is so much going on, and so much that we need to know."

But Enea hopes IBNA can help fill that void, noting that the association has applied for a US Environmental Protection Agency technical assistant grant to review shipyard clean-up documents, provide fact sheets, and host community meetings.

The Sierra Club’s Arthur Feinstein said that his group’s main concern around the dissolution is that Parcel E2, which contains an industrial and radiologically-impacted dump that burned for six months in 2000, and Parcel F are both coming up for analysis.

"These are some of the most significantly contaminated areas on the shipyard, so the timing is terrible," Feinstein told the Guardian, observing that some RAB members did not appear to be looking for solutions and were so aggressive they destroyed meetings.

"Unfortunately there weren’t enough forceful people to say ‘shut up and sit down,’" Feinstein said. "But without a RAB, there will be no public forum where folks are able to get and read materials ahead of the meeting, and then ask and submit questions."

Harrison, a member of the environmental justice group Green Action, believes the Navy’s intent is that there be no meaningful interaction with the community. "When you don’t toe the line and play like good little children, the Navy shuts you down," said Harrison, whose group, along with the Nation of Islam and the Caravan for Justice, are planning a June 30 demonstration at the shipyard to protest the move.

In another point of controversy, Sen. Mark Leno has legislation that seeks to trade 25 percent of Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, the only major piece of open space in the Bayview, for small strips on the shipyard so Lennar can build condos on the parkland.

Noting that Sen. Leland Yee and Assembly Members Tom Ammiano and Fiona Ma oppose the parks-for-condos plan (see "Going Nuclear," April 29), Harrison said, "What possessed anyone to believe that we’d say, okay, take the only open space in the Bayview, and in exchange we’ll accept contaminated land scattered around on the shipyard?"

Environmental advocates believe the Sierra Club intends to fight Leno’s legislation with a challenge under the California Environmental Quality Act, but Leno told the Guardian that he is "continuing to work and meet with the lobbyists for the Sierra Club here in Sacramento to see if there are any additional amendments we can take that would get them to a neutral position on the bill.

"I think there is a good possibility we can get there," Leno said.

In February, Arc Ecology released a 133-report titled "Alternatives for study" that recommended the removal of the Parcel E2 landfill and explored changes in land use arrangements in the current redevelopment proposal to avoid environmental impacts (see "Concrete Plans," Feb. 4). Unfortunately, they were largely ignored by the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, which is working with Lennar on the public-private development deal.

Arc Ecology executive director Saul Bloom remains undaunted, recalling how 87 percent of voters citywide supported Proposition P, an advisory measure he wrote and that then-Sups. Ammiano, Leno, Michael Yaki, and the late Sue Bierman placed on the ballot in 1989 to establish community acceptance criteria for the shipyard, under federal toxic cleanup guidelines.

"The Navy had offered their opinion that voters in San Francisco, and especially in the Bayview, would accept a nonresidential industrial level cleanup for the shipyard because they were primarily interested in jobs," Bloom recalled. "We said that this was a mischaracterization and we’d go ahead and prove them wrong."

He believes the current struggle with the Navy over the RAB, and with the city and Lennar over Arc’s alternatives, are "emblematic of the problem facing the Bayview with regard to accessing good information and being told the straight story on health and development issues."

Finally, justice

June 10, 2009

It’s not every day a journalist helps overturn life sentences and win multimillion dollar settlements for the aggrieved parties. But that’s exactly what happened last week when San Francisco reportedly agreed to pay $4.5 million to John Tennison, who spent 13 years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.

Tennison and his alleged accomplice, Antoine Goff, who were sentenced to life for the execution of Roderick "Cooley" Shannon in 1989, were still behind bars when former Guardian reporter A.C. Thompson dug into their case in 2001.

At the time police linked Shannon’s murder to a war between hoodsters in Visitation Valley and Hunter’s Point over control of the drug trade. Tennison and Goff both had alibis. As Thompson revealed ("The Hardest Time," 01/17/01), witnesses were coached to lie that the pair had committed the murder. In addition, defense lawyers weren’t told about witnesses who said the men were innocent or that a man named Lovinsky Ricard confessed to the crime.

When the Guardian published "The Hardest Time" as a cover story in 2001, Tennison’s brother, who worked in a parking lot near the Keker & Van Nest law office, put copies on the windshield of every car hoping lawyers would read it and offer to help. That’s what happened.

Two of the Keker firm’s associates, Ethan Balogh and Elliot Peters, picked up the case and helped SF Public Defender Jeff Adachi and a team of lawyers win Tennison and Goff’s freedom, working for three years pro bono.

Although it’s a triumph that the city agreed to compensate Tennison (a similar claim by Goff is pending), Shannon’s killer is still at large. In addition, former SF Police Chief Earl Sanders, detective Napoleon Hendrix, and prosecutor George Butterworth walked away without so much as a reprimand, even though Thompson ("The Chief’s other legal problem," 03/05/03) suggested they may have unethically helped put Tennison and Goff behind bars.

In 2003, when Tennison’s sentence was overturned, Thompson wrote: "After my journalistic probe, I felt fairly certain that a terrible injustice had been done, that Tennison and Goff had not killed Shannon, that police and prosecutors had engaged in dubious behavior, and that the real executioner was walking the streets. Still, I never expected the two men to go free. The criminal justice system is stacked against convicts who assert their innocence."

Round one

June 3, 2009

sarah@sfbg.com

The Board of Supervisors’ narrowly thwarted attempt to reject the Municipal Transportation Agency’s 2009-10 budget was the first in a wave of anticipated showdowns between Mayor Gavin Newsom and the progressives this summer as budget season gets underway.

The mayor appeared to win this particular showdown when the board voted 6-5 not to reject the MTA deal May 27, although the skirmish helped progressives voice their concerns over Newsom’s budget priorities. It also gave board President David Chiu the opportunity to conduct a masterful interrogation of MTA executive director Nat Ford that set the stage for Sup. John Avalos to try to place a charter amendment on the November ballot that would make MTA more accountable and accessible.

That said, the final MTA deal — which closes a $129 million deficit on the backs of Muni riders (through service cuts and fare hikes) rather than motorists (MTA governs all parking revenue) by a ratio of about 4-1 — seems to be inconsistent with San Francisco’s official "transit-first" policy.

Chiu was the first to suggest rejecting the deal when it became clear that the Mayor’s Office has been using the MTA as a backdoor ATM, authorizing $66 million in work orders for things like salaries for Newsom’s environmental aides and compensating the police department for vaguely defined security services.

The practice made a mockery of Prop. A., which voters approved in 2007 to increase funding to Muni by $26 million annually. But since then, work orders from unrelated city departments, including the police and Newsom’s 311 call center, had increased by $32 million.

"If people have to pay more for less, they will stop taking Muni," Chiu said at the May 6 Budget Committee hearing on the MTA budget.

Sup. David Campos also took issue with the work orders and service cuts. "Whatever money riders of Muni pay into the system should be used for public transportation," Campos said.

In the end, Chiu got the agency to trim $10 million from its budget, restore $8.6 million in proposed Muni service cuts, and delay the increases that seniors, youth, and the disabled will pay for fast passes. In exchange the board voted 6-5 May 12 to drop its MTA’s budget challenge, allowing fares to increase to $2 and for services to be reduced. Sups. Campos, Avalos, Ross Mirkarimi, Chris Daly, and Eric Mar dissented.

"We needed to work this out so we can move forward on the myriad issues before us," Chiu said.

But led by Avalos, who chairs the board’s powerful Budget and Finance Committee, the progressives revived the issue the next day. "Given our grave economic crisis, we owe it to seniors, youth, and other low-income Muni riders to come up with a better budget, one that ensures Muni accessibility and accountability," Avalos said.

Instead of increasing fares and cutting services, Avalos suggested that the MTA extend meter hours to evenings and Sundays. For a moment, it looked as if the progressives would be able to muster the seven votes needed to reject the deal. Ultimately Chiu, Sophie Maxwell, and the other MTA budget opponents stuck to the deal, which was reapproved May 27.

But the episode underscores why Avalos wants to reform the composition of the MTA board. Currently the mayor appoints all seven members. The only thing the supervisors can do is confirm or reject his nominations.

The mayor also appoints MTA’s executive director. Under Newsom, Ford was hired to the post for $316,000 annually, making him the city’s highest paid employee and someone who feels accountable to the mayor. "In all the cities, the mayor takes the heat for the transit system," Ford told the Guardian when challenged on his agency’s seeming lack of independence.

But under Avalos’ amendment, the mayor and the Board of Supervisors would each nominate three board commissioners while voters would elect the seventh. "The new MTA board composition will create greater checks and balances and also ensure that the MTA director is not solely accountable to one person, but to a board that is more representative of the city and county of San Francisco," Avalos said.

MTA now faces an additional $10 to $16 million deficit, thanks to union negotiations and fears that the state will raid city property tax and gas tax coffers. But as part of his budget deal with Chiu, Ford promised that the agency would study extending parking meter enforcement hours to close the gap.

Confirming that the agency dropped a $9 million a year proposal to extend meter hours citywide after receiving input from merchants, Ford said that "we’ll clearly have to revisit parking. We’ll be looking at how to administer extended meter hours, and how that impacts churches if we do it Sundays. But we are sitting here with a structural deficit that’s been going on for decades. We need to figure out the revenue streams we need to enhance the system."

Campos thought that a progressive Board of Supervisors should have gotten a better MTA budget. "As Sup. John Avalos and I pointed out, there’s almost nothing different between this budget and what was presented last week," Campos said. "I think it’s an illustration of how it is not enough to have power. You have to be willing to use it."

But Chiu defended his deal as a necessary way out of the board conflict with Newsom’s office. "Nat Ford has committed publicly and privately that he will propose meter hour change. And MTA Board President Tom Nolan has committed that he will ensure that car owners pick up more of the burden, and that if the budget gets worse, the additional problems won’t be balanced on the backs of Muni riders, which was not something we heard last week," Chiu said.

Avalos was less sanguine: "It was a clear moment for the Board of Supervisors to support transit-first and the city’s most vulnerable residents."

But he felt that concerns about the deal, and the realization that Newsom is an increasingly absent mayor, will help voters see the need for MTA reform.

"There wasn’t a single MTA commissioner or director accessible or accountable to the greater part of San Francisco. But they were responsive to Room 200, the Mayor’s Office," Avalos said. "Clearly, we need greater checks and balances."

Mirkarimi observed how, when faced with a crisis, people make practical decisions. "What gets lost when we are in crisis mode is our larger objective," he said. "We are a transit-first city that has strong climate change legislation, and Mayor Gavin Newsom is constantly campaigning on green issues. So it’s counterintuitive for us to broker an MTA budget on the backs of Muni riders and not understand that this deal could diminish that ridership."

But MTA spokesperson Judson True believes that what got lost in the discussion is that, as a result of Proposition A, the agency adopted a two-year budget that slapped drivers with increased rates and fees in 2008 while Muni riders and services were mostly spared.

Things changed, True said, when the economy tanked in 2008 and the MTA was left facing an unprecedented deficit. "At that point we reopened the budget and put everything on the table," True said.

Either way, Chiu has been urging supervisors to move on and focus on the next big thing: the mayor’s budget. "There’s a half-billion dollar hole in this budget," Chiu said last week. "It’ll make this debate look like child’s play."

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

Dystopian enterprise

May 27, 2009

Best-selling author Richard North Patterson stays out of the local limelight, but he’s a San Francisco resident — and we caught up with him May 21st to talk about his new book, Eclipse, and the role that U.S. oil companies play in Nigeria.

Before Nigerian environmental activist (and Goldman Environmental Prize winner) Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged in 1995, PEN, the international writers’ group, wrote letters and organized protests against the execution. "I was very impressed by Saro-Wiwa," says Patterson, who was on the board of PEN at the time. He notes that Saro-Wiwa was a nonviolence advocate who succeeded in building a grassroots movement among the Ogoni in the Nigerian delta — all in the face of a ruthless dictator, and at great risk to his wife.

As Patterson recalls, despite the protests, several Western governments voicing their concerns, and then-President Bill Clinton’s hour-long conversation with Nigeria’s military dictator Gen. Sani Abacha, "They unceremoniously hung Saro-Wiwa. It was a lesson in a number of things, beginning with the degree to which oil makes autocrats feel impervious."

Post- 9/11, oil "security" became a bigger concern. Patterson began to realize that amid the U.S. failures in the Middle East, the disaster in Iraq, and the growing fear of al Qaeda, everyone was looking at Nigeria as an even more important source of oil.

"Meanwhile Nigeria’s environment was that much more ruined, its political leadership hopelessly corrupt, a semi-official militia that claimed to be acting in Saro-Wiwa’s name was killing each other and stealing oil, and everyone had a fee," says Patterson. "It was a classic example of how a natural resource makes its extractors and the rulers rich, but only serves as a source of misery for people standing on the ground. I already felt that Saro-Wiwa was a remarkable man who should be remembered. But now he was becoming even more relevant."

Patterson began researching Saro-Wiwa’s life, a quest that involved one trip to Nigeria and many conversations with lots of related experts. "Nigeria is not a place to go back and forth to — you’d think I was trying to break into Las Vegas," he says, noting that he hired security during his trip. "I’m not unknown, so there was a concern I’d be a high-value target. But I loved the Nigerians I met. They were a bright enterprising bunch in a dystopian setting, and to the extent I couldn’t go places, I did all I could by talking to people, reading articles, and watching films."

The name of Eclipse‘s protagonist is Bobby Okari. Was Patterson making reference to President Barack Obama? "If I was, it was subliminal," he says.

So what can Americans do to improve the plight of everyday Nigerians? "Increasing our independence from oil and increasing our foreign aid to Nigeria would be helpful," Patterson says. "The real problem is the extent to which human rights are trumped by self-interest. When we fill up our tanks, half of us don’t know that there’s oil in Nigeria. So first we need to become aware of the impact of the commodities we need. But I’m not sanguine about how easy this is. Saro-Wiwa was hung and 14 years later, where are we? The same place, and that’s a disgrace."

While Patterson does not excuse what he calls "the callousness of the U.S. oil companies," he believes that first we must address the Nigerian government.

"The history of the oil industry in Nigeria is pretty ignoble, but [without the industry] they can’t maintain the schools, roads, hospitals, and clinics," he says. "If the government doesn’t give a damn, it’s hard to make a quasi-government out of an oil company. When we get angry at the oil companies, it begs the question, What is the government doing? If it isn’t encouraging economic development and environmental protection, how can the oil companies? Shell and Chevron didn’t invent corruption. This is in no way to defend them. [But] there is a disconnect between Nigeria’s miserable government and its citizens. One of my central aspirations is to tell an entertaining story — and also to convey an awareness of a real problem."

ChevWrong

May 27, 2009

news@sfbg.com

When Chevron Corp. holds its annual shareholders meeting at its San Ramon headquarters May 27, its top executives are expected to give investors a glowing report on how this global enterprise came to rake in a profit of $23.9 billion last year — a staggering 28.1 percent increase over the past year.

As Chevron CEO Dave O’Reilly put it in the company’s annual report, 2008 was "a momentous year." Apparently O’Reilly will also claim that his company’s activities are improving people’s lot worldwide. "Energy," he writes, "is not a luxury — it’s the foundation for economic growth. By investing in the future, we’re creating value not only for our stakeholders, but we’re also building economic prosperity around the globe."

But O’Reilly’s high opinion of his company is not shared by a growing coalition of groups who believe that Chevron’s fifth consecutive year of record profits was earned, once again, at the cost of degrading the environment and its poorest communities, both here in Richmond and further afield, from the Amazon and Nigeria to Iraq and Kazakhastan.

Critics, who include what they describe as "a coalition of those directly affected by Chevron’s operations, political control, consumer abuse, and false promises," planned to hold a May 26 press conference to release The True Cost of Chevron, an alternative annual report that seeks to provide Chevron shareholders "with the most comprehensive exposé of Chevron’s operations — and the communities in struggle against them — ever compiled," according to the report’s authors.

The study includes reports from Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, the Gulf Coast, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Utah, Washington, D.C, and Wyoming as well as Angola, Burma, Canada, Chad, Cameroon, Ecuador, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and the Philippines.

The next day, people carrying shareholder proxies intend to enter Chevron’s annual meeting to discuss the report with shareholders while a protest is held at Chevron’s front gates.

"Chevron’s 2008 annual report is a glossy celebration of the company’s most profitable year in its history, and one in which CEO David O’Reilly became the 15th highest paid U.S. chief executive, with nearly $50 million in total 2008 compensation," the authors state. "What Chevron’s annual report does not tell its shareholders is the true cost paid for those financial returns or the global movement gaining voice and strength against Chevron’s abuses."

The 44-page report details numerous lawsuits against the company, nationally and around the world — cases, the report’s authors claim, that have "potential liabilities in excess of Chevron’s total revenue from 2008, posing a material threat to shareholder value and the company’s bottom line."

As they wrote: "When a company operates in blatant disregard for the health, security, livelihood, safety, and environment of communities within which it operates, there can be real financial repercussions."

The report concludes with six specific obligations demanded of Chevron and leaves shareholders with the following message: "Chevron is right. The world will continue to use oil as it transitions to a sustainable green renewable energy economy. Whether Chevron will be in business as we make the transition depends upon what sort of company it chooses to be and whether the public is willing to support it."

The report also includes a series of large "ChevWrong Inhumane Energy ads" that spoof Chevron’s Human Energy ad campaign — images that popped up all across San Francisco last week after a group of renegade Chevron critics gathered at an secret location, mixed batches of wheat paste, and grabbed armfuls of the freely downloadable posters and set off into the night to bomb the city streets with the series of subvertisements.

Claiming that Chevron’s Human Energy campaign, which depicts smiling people alongside phrases like "I will try to leave the car at home more" is an attempt to greenwash the petro-giant’s activities, this group of mostly youthful critics pointed to the ongoing pollution, human rights abuses, and wars in regions where the oil company is stationed as they set off on bicycles, skateboards, and foot, armed with glue rollers and stacks of "ChevWrong" images. Some stashed their tools in Banana Republic shopping bags, which gave them an almost comical air of being disoriented tourists as they lurked and lingered on city street corners searching for suitable spots to paste their alternative ad campaign.

Soon newspaper racks on Market Street, pillars outside the Ferry Building, buildings in the Richmond District, and walls in North Beach bore the fruits of their work — along with the glass office door of public relations consultant Sam Singer, who represented Chevron in criticizing two renowned Ecuadorian environmental activists who were in town to receive the Goldman Prize.

"I will not complain about my asthma," states one such subversive ad, which depicts a beautiful but non-smiling young black man beside the claim that "Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, Calif. poisons the community." The ad is accompanied by a retooled logo that says "ChevWrong."

"I will try not to get cancer," states another that hot glue artists had affixed to Sandra Bullocks’ buttocks — or at least a life-sized depiction of the actress featured on a Market Street billboard promoting The Proposal.

"I will suffer in silence" states another, alongside the claim that Chevron props up Burma’s military dictatorship.

An ad reading "I will give my baby contaminated water" portrayed a smiling Nigerian woman alongside the claim that Chevron refuses to clean up its mess in Nigeria.

One activist told the Guardian she got involved "because Chevron is poisoning communities and cutting corners across the world, and is even shameless enough to do that here in Richmond."

Another said he was inspired to take this action because of a billion-dollar lawsuit Chevron is fighting in Ecuador, and because of its activities in Nigeria.

Others said they decided to drop the subvertisements all over the city after they heard that CBS Outdoor refused May 14 to sell the group space for the images on billboards citywide.

As they noted, the images are all freely downloadable from truecostofchevron.com, a site supported by Amazon Watch, Crude Accountability, Global Exchange, Justice in Nigeria Now, Rainforest Action Network, CorpWatch, Filipino-American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity, Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, Trustees for Alaska, Communities for a Better Environment, Mpalabanda, Richmond Progressive Alliance, and EarthRights International.

Mitch Anderson, corporate accountability campaigner with Amazon Watch, confirmed that members of the truecostofchevron coalition approached CBS Outdoor but were told that CBS has a policy not to run negative or attack ads — a claim Anderson found laughable. "What about all the attack ads we see posted during election season?"

A CBS Outdoor spokesperson confirmed that CBS had refused to accept the proposed ad campaign, and that it is the company’s policy not to run negative or attack ads.

Calls to Rachel Sutton, Chevron PR person at its corporate headquarters in San Ramon, seeking comments about truecostofchevron’s charges remained unanswered as of press time.

But at Amazon Watch, Anderson said he thought it was "great that the Bay Area community took to the streets this week to tell Chevron that our hearts and minds are not for sale.

"Chevron is trying to paper-over its widespread human rights and environmental problems across the world by spending millions to propagate insulting lies," he continued. "From its disaster in Ecuador to its hiring of global warming deniers as lobbyists, this company has shown complete disregard for the environment, human rights, and yes, wisdom. Chevron is on the wrong side of history. Just as there can be no social justice on a dead planet, Chevron should know that you can’t profit off a dead planet either."

In a final swipe at Chevron’s Human Energy campaign, critics are distributing posters that ask "Will you join us?" and show a woman smiling alongside the promise "I will protest Chevron."

Crash landings

May 19, 2009

news@sfbg.com

As the U.S. military wrestles with President Barack Obama’s plan to expand the war in Afghanistan while reducing its presence in Iraq, there’s a mounting cost on the home front for the 1.9 million soldiers who have been deployed to those conflicts and are now beginning the often difficult transition back to civilian life.

Inadequate stateside mental health and other veterans’ services has been serious problem for years (see "Soldier’s heart, 12/22/04). A report in January 2008 by the RAND Corp. titled "Invisible Wounds of War" found that nearly 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans report symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression, and that an additional 19 percent experienced a possible traumatic brain injury while deployed. But only slightly more than half of these returning veterans seek treatment that RAND called "minimally adequate."

The report estimated that PTSD and depression will cost the nation $6.2 billion in the two years following deployment, but also estimated that investing in more high-quality treatment — and thus lowering the rates of suicide and lost productivity among veterans — could reduce those costs by $2 billion within two years. Modern life-saving and protective technologies and repeated deployments appear to be making the problem worse now than in previous wars.

"Early evidence suggests the psychological toll of the deployments may be disproportionately high compared with physical injuries," the report stated, concluding that a national effort is needed to expand and improve the capacity of the health care system and to encourage veterans to seek this care.

That national picture is reflected in San Francisco. Judi Cheary of San Francisco’s Department of Veteran Affairs medical clinic said that 25 percent of the service members they see returning from Afghanistan and Iraq receive a mental health diagnosis.

Keith Armstrong, the clinic’s PTSD counselor and a professor of psychiatry at University of California-San Francisco, noted that veterans often have a diagnosis that includes depression and PTSD, or substance abuse and PTSD. "So they may be struggling with many problems," said Armstrong, who wrote Courage After Fire: Coping Strategies for Troops Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and Their Families (Ulysses Press, 2005). "Others simply have adjustment challenges from being in combat."

For instance, traffic can be difficult for returning service members who drove in combat conditions, where explosives were a constant concern. "They are scanning the environment because that’s what kept them safe in combat, or pushing the steering wheel when a friend is driving, trying to move from one lane to another," he explained.

According to V.A. data, California has the third-highest number of veterans in the nation. In Northern California, most live in the Central Valley, leaving some San Francisco vets feeling isolated. "There’s a lot of talk about supporting the troops, which is nice, but it’s intellectual," Armstrong said. "Here people may not disclose that a family member is in war, not because they’re afraid people will spit on him, but because they are afraid that people will say dumb things."

His clinic has seen an increase in these veterans in the past year. Armstrong typically sees three clusters of PTSD symptoms: intrusive symptoms (vets can’t get particular images and experiences out of their head); avoidance symptoms (vets believe they don’t have a great future ahead; they feel numb, it’s hard to get close to them); and arousal symptoms (vets are often irritable and angry).

Anger often causes the most problems. "We see more self-destructive and reckless behavior in younger folks," he added. "They have anger, revenge-based fantasies. They know what it’s like to blow someone’s head off or to see it being blown off, so when they get angry, that crosses their mind." But he said that couples and families often talk more about "the numbing" and "the inability to connect."

Armstrong also pointed out that many vets worry about the effect on their career of getting help, and how it looks to others if they do. "That’s due to both their training and age group," he said, noting that 50 percent of soldiers are 17-to-24-year-olds, and 89 percent are male.

"So it’s not just about war, but about the developmental stage of the troops," he said. "It’s an appropriate age to be independent and not get any help. But that, combined with the stigma of asking for help — and if they have PTSD avoidance symptoms — can keep them from going in."

As a result of recent studies showing that PTSD can develop up to five years after discharge, the V.A. extended what was previously a two-year limit in which veterans could get help to a five-year window. They also now have a suicide prevention hotline number for vets: 1-800-273-8255.

"The V.A. overall has made some mistakes, but it has really taken suicide prevention seriously," Armstrong said.

There are nonprofit options as well. Founded in 1974, Swords to Plowshares provides counseling and case management, employment, training, housing, and legal assistance to homeless and low-income veterans.

Equally important, it’s staffed by veterans like Walter Williams, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and has combat-related PTSD, and Tia Christopher, a survivor of military sexual trauma. "The experience of being in a war zone as well, or being sexually assaulted by some one in your own unit, that’s profound," Armstrong said.

As Christopher explained, she and Williams have similar symptoms and attend weekly V.A. appointments to deal with their own mental health issues, between providing services to other veterans at the group’s Howard Street office.

"Pretty much everyone coming back has combat stress and everyone I know has been buying rifles," Christopher said, noting that cleaning guns can be a meditative therapeutic activity for veterans. "Combat stress becomes clinical PTSD when those symptoms don’t go away."

Christopher said women who were in combat and survived military sexual trauma face "a double whammy." Out of the military for more than seven years, Christopher observed that "things get better, but the memories don’t go away."

In 2007 there were more than 2,000 reported military sexual assaults, but only 181 were court-martialed, she said. "So basically survivors are dealing with injustice of nothing happening.

"I used to wish that PTSD gave you purple spots," she added. "That way people would know you had it. Instead, you are left dealing with getting panic attacks all of a sudden and being on edge."

"I call it a flare-up," Williams said. "It’s different each time. Sometimes, when I have to focus and get my mind around something, I’m blank. I feel like I want to cry, but I can’t."

Unlike past generations who openly identified as vets, "this new wave of vets is "more intent on blending in," Williams said. "They’re trying to suppress their symptoms. They don’t want to be seen as weirdos."

Deployed to Iraq and then Afghanistan as a communications specialist in 2004, Williams recalled having to give up his weapon twice and being put on suicide watch. "For a week, they watched me, then they gave me my weapon back."

He’s convinced that the best solutions to the challenges facing this latest wave of PTSD-afflicted vets lie in "listening to stories from the mouths of people with it," he said.

Bobbi Rosenthal, regional coordinator for V.A.’s homeless program, said that an estimated 20 percent of the 6,514 people recorded in San Francisco’s 2009 homeless count are veterans.

Anita Yoskowitz, administrative site manager for the V.A.’s homeless services center on Third Street, said 90 percent of the vets who use the clinic’ showers, laundry facilities, and computer lab have PTSD.

And while many of the center’s clients are still from the Vietnam and Desert Storm era, the average age is starting to come down, she said, as veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan begin to trickle in.

Veterans can come to the clinic every day, but those who are not clean and sober are limited to three times a week. When folks come for medical care, Yoskowitz said, "the clinic is on the look out for mental health problems."

Jacob Hoff, who volunteers at the center’s computer lab, said that from conversations he overhears, it’s clear that coming back is hard. "There’s a lot of survivor’s guilt. I can really tell the young kids who are coming in and learning how to be homeless. The older guys tell them where to go for food."

Donald Fontenot, who enlisted in 1980, was on the computer looking for housing when he shared his story. He enlisted when he was 18 and then messed up his knees jumping out of a C-141 jet, so he understands the stress of no longer being able to perform.

"You are young and strong and then all of a sudden, you can’t do these things," said Fontenot, who was living in his car behind the clinic until it got towed by the police. "So I wound up more homeless."

Currently staying with a friend, Fontenot recalled meeting a Vietnam vet who likes to walk around Golden Gate Park at night with a pistol. "It gives him the feeling of walking around in the jungle," said Fontenot, who is searching for suitable Section 8 housing — another unique challenge for PTSD-afflicted veterans in San Francisco.

For some, the road to recovery leads them from the streets of San Francisco back into the arms of their family. One such local family shared their story with the Guardian and we decided to shield their identities for privacy. Mike recalled the dramatic change he saw in his brother, Joe, who joined the Marines directly after 9/11, after he tore up his shoulder in Iraq.

"His whole mentality, even if he didn’t support the war in Iraq, was of a to-die-for-it Marine," said Mike, recalling the hurt and disappointment in Joe’s voice after he had two surgeries, and couldn’t return with his unit to combat.

Mike said his brother’s state of mind worsen after he had been out of active duty for three years, and that the first signs that his brother might have PTSD were night sweats and an inability to pay attention.

"But how can you expect soldiers to pay attention to isolated thoughts, words, and action, when they are or have been immersed in culture that teaches you to ‘walk, talk, shoot, shit’?" Mike asked.

Joe was homeless in San Francisco for stints in 2007, but never longer than a week. Mike recalled how things came to a head when the two brothers got into a fight one night after Mike closed the bar where he worked.

"Here we are, I’m 30 and he is 28, in a fist fight, and I told [Joe], ‘I think you’re losing your mind.’ And he said, ‘then save me,’ lying on my kitchen floor at four in the morning. But then that was it, no more conversation."

Joe soon checked himself into a couple of private facilities where he berated psychiatrists for not knowing about military combat zones and could always check himself out. "Then he went over to the East Bay, went into a 24-hour Fitness Center to use the shower, got into it with a security guard for trespassing and disorderly conduct, got arrested, and was brought to the V.A.’s PTSD center in Palo Alto," Mike said.

It was at this state-of-the art facility that Joe began to get help, and this year he returned to Chicago, where he is living with family until he returns to school to pursue his master’s degree. Joe’s mother, Betty, said dealing with all this has been minor compared to the prospect of losing her middle son permanently. But she resisted labeling behavior she believes was connected to his imploding marriage and financial problems when he moved to California, as well as to fallout from his injuries in Iraq.

She recalls getting an e-mail from their now former daughter-in law saying, "Joe has been living in the park, camping." Betty said the first year after Joe came back was pretty tough. "We knew the marriage was over. And a couple of times I called two of his real close friends who are Marines, to tough-talk to him. For a period of time, he was acting out, a different person. You could tell something wasn’t right, and yeah, some blamed it on the service."

Asked what she thought of giving vets with PTSD a Purple Heart, an idea the military floated earlier this year, Betty said, "I don’t know. They all have to go through it in some respects. My feelings about why he ended up totally collapsing is that he was trying to do too much on too little. They are over there, building cities and lives for people. Then they get back and find they can’t support their families or themselves. But at least it’s not like when folks came back from Vietnam and were labeled as bums."

Guardian staff writer Sarah Phelan’s son deployed to Iraq in 2007 and returned in April 2008.

Saving the southeast

May 13, 2009

sarah@sfbg.com

This map of all foreclosures in San Francisco shows a heavy concentration in the southern part of the city, home to many low-income communities of color.

When Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Sophie Maxwell convened a task force in July 2007 to figure out why African Americans are leaving San Francisco and how to reverse this trend, the subprime loan market crisis was about to send a shock wave of home foreclosures sweeping through southeast San Francisco.

Hope SF, the promised rebuild of the city’s public housing projects, is underway at a cost of $95 million. The city’s certificates of preference program, giving housing priority to black residents displaced by redevelopment, has been expanded and extended. But little has been done to address the immediate problem.

Instead political leaders have focused on a plan to subsidize Lennar Corp.’s construction of thousands of new condos in the southeast section of the city — the heart of the San Francisco’s remaining African American community — and have done nothing to promote a plan that could convert hundreds of foreclosed homes into affordable for-sale or rental units there, right here, right now.

African American Out Migration Task Force (AAOMTF) members recall warning that the crisis would likely hit San Francisco’s already dwindling black population extra hard. And Sup. John Avalos, who was running for election in District 11, remembers seeing impacts in the Excelsior District as early as 2007.

"I was telling people in early 2007 that this was a problem in District 11, and even real estate people didn’t believe me," recalled Avalos, who is exploring legislation to hold banks accountable and spoke at an ACORN protest in support of Excelsior homeowner Genaro Paed, a Filipino native who just staved off eviction orders pending the outcome of his lawsuit against Washington Mutual concerning what Paed describes as "a predatory loan" secured in 2006.

Avalos also planned to introduce legislation on May 12 that would expand protection of renters, including those in foreclosed homes who are now being evicted by banks.

This isn’t the first time city leaders have studied the African American exodus or ways to prevent low-income and minority households from being preyed upon or displaced. Indeed, this task force’s initial findings, (released last summer after Lennar spent millions to persuade voters to support building 10,000 condos in the city’s southeast) suggests San Francisco’s entire black community is at risk unless proactive and immediate steps are taken.

According to U.S. Census data, the city’s African American population shrank to 6.6 percent of the city’s total population by 2005 (a 40 percent decline since 1990) and will likely slip to 4.6 percent by 2050, according to the California Department of Finance. And these findings were made before the foreclosure crisis heated up.

In 2008 Maxwell and other elected officials convened a Fair Lending Working Group (FLWG) to figure out how to respond to the wave of foreclosures. By year’s end, there were 667 home foreclosures in San Francisco, almost all in the city’s southeast sector.

These numbers sound small compared to Contra Costa County or Oakland, where thousands of foreclosures occurred. And they aren’t big enough to qualify for the first round of President Barack Obama’s National Stabilization Program grants, which were released earlier this year. Based on a census-driven formula, the grants sent $8 million to Oakland and no money to San Francisco.

But with half the city’s foreclosures in the Bayview, home to most of the city’s remaining African Americans, the fact that little has been done to save these homes — or to follow early recommendations to do so — is a gentrification crisis in the making.

Ed Donaldson, housing counseling director at the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation in the Bayview District, served on the FLWG and remembers suggesting a two-tier track. First, take steps to protect renters in places that have been foreclosed and second, buy as many foreclosed properties as possible with the aim of reselling or leasing them as affordable units. While the FLWG liked the renter protection angle, it did not support the foreclosure acquisition program.

"The idea fell on deaf ears," recalls Donaldson, who was disappointed his foreclosure purchase plan didn’t make it onto FLWG’s recent recommendation list. FLWG members include financial institutions such as Wells Fargo, Washington Mutual, and Patelco Credit Union; community-based organizations such as Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, SFHDC, Mission Economic Development Agency; and city agencies. The agency also has received staff support from Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, the Mayor’s Office of Housing, Treasurer Jose Cisneros and the Office of the Legislative Analyst.

"We’d already seen the spike in foreclosure numbers, so how did these recommendations get pushed out? We need something with teeth," Donaldson said.

SFHDC executive director Regina Davis says she suggested a foreclosure purchase and resale plan as an AAOMTF member and was concerned when she noticed that her recommendation was not included on the list discussed at the April 23 meeting. Billed as a closing-out session, that meeting took place at the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and was attended by Davis, chair Aileen Hernandez, Redevelopment director Fred Blackwell, the Rev. Amos Brown, Barbara Cohen of the African American Action Network, Tinisch Hollins of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, and former supervisor and assessor Doris Ward, among others. The AAOMTF is finishing up its work this week.

"I got involved because I believed that in exchange for participation, we would see things done and/or funded. Part of what we want to see are real action items that keep African Americans in San Francisco or bring them back. So we really want this issue to move forward with substance," Davis told the Guardian.

Recognizing that San Francisco is facing massive budget constraints, SFHDC is proposing to borrow $1.5 million from Clearinghouse CDFI, a Los Angeles community development financial agency, to acquire and rehabilitate these foreclosed properties.

Davis’ group would then turn it around and offer residents several options: buy (if the prospective buyer qualifies for the city’s $150,000 downpayment assistance and a $50,000 loan from the California Housing Financing Agency); lease (in which SFHDC sells the home to the buyer but leases the land, making the price affordable), lease-to-own. Or, Davis adds, people could rent the units at affordable rates.

But to make the plan work, SFHDC need the banks to sell the properties AT below market rates. Noting that foreclosed properties are still selling in the Bayview for $400,000, Davis says her nonprofit intends to purchase 100 to 200 homes during a 24-month period at less than $200,000 mark.

Yet Davis remains optimistic about the plan’s chances as SFHDC negotiates with major banks for a 50 percent discount, noting that there is a monthly average of 50 foreclosures in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point, and SFHDC has access to 100 qualified buyers.

Blackwell said the Redevelopment Agency hasn’t developed an initiative or a funding pool to respond to the foreclosures in the city’s southeast sector. But, he said, the agency is looking at ways to apply for National Stabilization Program funds even though "federal guidelines mostly don’t apply well in expensive markets like San Francisco.

"We are engaged in advocacy so San Francisco can take advantage of any federal stabilization funds, but we don’t have an agency-specific proposal," he continued.

"Frankly, I think community-based organizations are the best to do programs like that, especially since there is so much anxiety about the Redevelopment Agency and property acquisition in the southeast," Blackwell added.

He believes that given the city’s current budgetary constraints, the AAOMTF "will likely look for leadership from the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors in cases where members have made recommendations and there is an opportunity to bring in public money."

Blackwell feels the city is still getting its mind around its foreclosure problem. "We’ve been spared the wholesale neighborhood-by-neighborhood devastation that places like Antioch faced," Blackwell said. "So, there wasn’t the same sense of urgency. And there’s a need to look more closely at the data. A lot of the information is based on anecdotes."

Yet the feds seem willing to help if city officials take the initiative. Larry Bush, spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s regional office, says San Francisco and Oakland could file a joint foreclosure plan application.

"If they can identify 100 homes, they’d be eligible for $5 million," Bush said, noting one snag that could unravel the plan locally. "Foreclosed properties must be vacant for at least six months. And as you know, in San Francisco, foreclosed homes still sell."

Maxwell says the city could do more to confront predatory lenders and enforce tenant rights, as well as developing a plan to buy foreclosed properties. "But in San Francisco it’s an issue because of relatively high prices," she told us.

Yet the city’s high prices are the very problem pushing out low-income residents. African American home ownership actually increased after 1990, even as out-migration among black renters increased. But now, if the foreclosures stand, that exodus will likely accelerate.

Asked if she supports SFHDC’s current foreclosure plan, Maxwell said, "It makes sense to me. If that could be done, it would be optimal."

Myrna Melgar of the Mayor’s Office of Housing says she’s not sure that a foreclosure resale plan would work in San Francisco for folks who bought a couple of years ago, when house prices hit $700,000, only to see house prices fall to around $400,000.

"San Francisco is a very different universe from Detroit," Melgar said. "Properties don’t sit around empty and vacant. They are bought by speculators who are betting that in two or three years, their values will go up. So if we had money to buy these properties, which we don’t, we’d be in competition with the speculators, who have lots of money with no strings attached, and who drive the prices up."

Another difference, Melgar said, is that San Francisco banks are holding onto 50 percent of their foreclosed properties, whereas Antioch banks are only holding onto 22 percent. "We’d like to keep folks in the homes," Melgar said. "But it’s a policy issue related to the reality that we have such limited funds."

Going nuclear

April 28, 2009

news@sfbg.com

April Fool’s Day is known as a day for practical jokes designed to embarrass the gullible.

But Assembly Member Tom Ammiano’s legislative aide Quentin Mecke says the April 1 letter that Ammiano and fellow Assembly Members Fiona Ma and state Sen. Leland Yee sent Mayor Gavin Newsom urging him not to support a proposal to bury a radiologically-contaminated dump beneath a concrete cap on the Hunters Point Shipyard was dead serious.

In their letter, Ammiano, Ma, and Lee expressed concern over that fact that federal officials don’t want to pay to haul toxic and radioactive dirt off the site before it’s used for parkland. They noted that an "estimated 1.5 million tons of toxics and radioactive material still remain" on the site.

A 1999 ordinance passed by San Francisco voters as Proposition P "recognized that the U.S. Navy had for decades negligently polluted the seismically-active shipyard, and that the city should not accept early transfer of the shipyard to San Francisco’s jurisdiction, unless and until it is cleaned up to the highest standards," the legislators wrote. "Given the information we have, a full cleanup needs to happen," Mecke told us.

But Newsom’s response so far suggests he may be willing to accept the Navy’s proposal.

WAR WASTE

From the 1940s to 1974, according to the Navy’s 2004 historical radiological assessment, the Navy dumped industrial, domestic, and solid waste, including sandblast waste, on a portion of the site known as Parcel E. Among the materials that may be underground: decontamination waste from ships returning from Operation Crossroads — in which atomic tests in the South Pacific went awry, showering Navy vessels with a tidal wave of radioactive material.

"We have serious questions about the city accepting what is essentially a hazardous and radioactive waste landfill adjacent to a state park along the bay, in a high liquefaction zone with rising sea levels," the letter reads. "We understand that the Navy is pushing for a comparatively low-cost engineering solution which the Navy believes will contain toxins and radioactive waste in this very unstable geology. We hope that you and your staff aggressively oppose this option."

Keith Forman, the Navy’s base realignment and closure environmental coordinator for the shipyard, told the Guardian that the Navy produced a report that did a thorough analysis of the site.

The Pentagon estimates that excavating the dump would cost $332 million, last four years, and cause plenty of nasty smells. Simply leaving the toxic stew in place and putting a cap on it would cost $82 million.

Espanola Jackson, who has lived in Bayview Hunters Point for half a century, says the community has put up with bad smells for decades thanks to the nearby sewage treatment plant. "So what’s four more years?" Jackson told the Guardian.

Judging from his April 21 reply to the three legislators, who represent San Francisco in Sacramento, Newsom is committed only to a technically acceptable cleanup — which is not the same thing as pushing to completely dig up and haul away the foul material in the dump.

He noted that during his administration federal funding for shipyard clean-up "increased dramatically, with almost a half-billion dollars secured in the last six years." Newsom also told Ammiamo, Ma, and Yee that the city won’t accept the Parcel E landfill until both the state Department of Toxic Substances Control and the federal Environmental Protection Agency "agree that it will be safe for its intended use."

The intended use for Parcel E-2 is parks and open space, said Michael Cohen, Newsom’s right-hand man in the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. The Navy won’t issue its final recommendations until next summer. "That’s when regulatory agencies decide what the clean up should be, whether that’s a dig and haul, a cap, or a mix of the two, " Cohen explained.

TRUCKS OR TRAINS?

Part of the Navy’s concern is the expense of trucking the toxic waste from San Francisco to a secure landfill elsewhere — someplace designed to contain this sort of material (and someplace less likely to have earthquakes that could shatter a cap and let the nasty muck escape).

David Gavrich and Eric Smith say the Navy is looking at the wrong solution. Gavrich, founder of the shipyard-based Waste Solutions Group and the San Francisco Bay Railroad, which transports waste and recyclables, and Eric Smith, founder of the biodiesel-converting company Green Depot, who shares space with Gavrich and a herd of goats that help keep the railyard surrounding their Cargo Way office weed-free, say the military solution is long-haul diesel trucks. But, he observes, the waste could be moved at far less cost (and less environmental impact) if it went by train.

Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, a nonprofit that specializes in tracking military base reuse and cleanup operations, would also like to see the landfill removed, even though he’s not sure about the trucks vs. train options.

"We don’t have confidence about having a dump on San Francisco Bay," Bloom said. "I’m concerned about the relationship between budgetary dollars and remediation of the site. I’m concerned that the community’s voice, which is saying they’d like to see the landfill removed, is not being heard."

Mark Ripperda of EPA’s Region 9 told us that community acceptance is important, but a remedy must also be evaluated using nine specific criteria.

"A remedy must first meet the threshold criteria," Ripperda said. "If it passes the threshold test, then it is evaluated against the primary balancing criteria and finally the modifying criteria are applied."

Noting that he has not received any communication from either the Assembly Members or the Mayor’s Office concerning the Parcel E-2 cleanup, Ripperda said that "the evaluation of alternatives considered rail, barge, and truck transport, with rail being the most favorable transportation mode for the complete excavation alternative. However, the waste would still be transported and disposed into a landfill somewhere else and the alternatives must be evaluated under all nine criteria."

Ripperda said it’s feasible to remove the worst stuff — the "hot spots" — and cap the rest. "A cap will eliminate pathways for exposure and can be designed to withstand seismic events," he told us. "The landfill has been in place for decades and the groundwater data shows little leaching of contaminants."

Meanwhile Newsom has tried to redirect the problem to Ammiano, Ma, and Yee, saying he seeks their "active support in directing even more state and federal funds" toward cleaning up the shipyard. He made clear he wants to move the redevelopment project forward — now.

Sen. Mark Leno is carrying legislation that includes a state land swap vital to the city’s plans to allow Lennar Corp. to build housing and commercial space on the site.

But while Cohen claims the aim of the land trade is to "build another Crissy Field," some environmentalists worry it will bifurcate the southeast sector’s only major open space. They also suspect that was the reason Leno didn’t sign Ammiano’s April 1 letter.

Leno says that omission occurred because Sacramento-based lobbyist Bob Jiroux, who Leno claims drafted the letter, never asked Leno to sign. (Jiroux refused to comment.)

Claiming he would have signed Ammiano’s letter given the chance, Leno described Jiroux as a "good Democrat" who used to work for Sen. John Burton, but now works for Lang, Hansen, O’Malley, and Miller, a Republican-leaning lobbying firm in Sacramento whose clients include Energy Solutions, a Utah-based low-level nuclear waste disposal facility that stands to profit if San Francisco excavates Parcel E-2.

Ammiano dismisses the ensuing furor over Energy Solutions as a "tempest in a teapot.

"I signed that letter to Newsom because of the truth that it contains," Ammiano said. "Sure, there’s crazy stuff going on. But within the insanity, there’s a progressive message: the community wants radiological contaminants removed from the shipyard."

Shades of green

April 15, 2009

sarah@sfbg.com

When President Barack Obama signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in mid-February, folks across the country were hopeful that the $787 billion stimulus package would help preserve and create decent jobs in their communities.

And in mid-March, when the Obama administration announced that Bay Area social justice activist Van Jones was joining the White House Council on Environmental Quality, advocates for green jobs took it as a sign that Obama shares Jones’ belief that we can fix our nation’s two biggest problems — excessive greenhouse gas production and not enough good jobs for the working class — by creating a green-collar economy.

Jones cofounded Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which opposes police abuse and promotes alternatives to incarceration, and founded Oakland’s Green for All, which aims to create green-collar jobs in low-income communities. He defines a green-collar job as "a family-supporting, career-track job that directly contributes to preserving or enhancing environmental quality."

"Think of them as the 2.0 version of old-fashioned blue-collar jobs, upgraded to respect the Earth and meet the environmental challenges of today," Jones wrote in his New York Times bestseller The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (HarperOne, 2008).

But is Jones’ definition codified into Obama’s Recovery Act? And in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom speaks incessantly about green jobs and regularly praises Jones, will the jobs we create be for the people who need them most? And how will that play out in a city where blacks, Latinos and Asians experience higher unemployment, poverty, and incarceration rates than whites, and building construction has stalled, pitting skilled union workers against training program graduates?

Last month, an alliance of community and worker organizations from San Francisco’s working class neighborhoods sent a letter to Newsom outlining concerns about the Recovery Act’s equity, job quality, and transparency requirements.

Antonio Diaz of PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights), Alex Tom of the Chinese Progressive Association, Steve Williams of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), and Terry Valen of the Filipino Community Center asked Newsom to ensure that ARRA funds would be used to create "green jobs and opportunities primarily for low-income people and people of color" and "high quality jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits, safe and healthy working conditions, and career ladders."

"We ask for your commitment to greater transparency and community input in shaping and monitoring the infusion of ARRA funds for San Francisco’s developing green collar economy," they wrote.

Two weeks later Newsom announced the launching of www.recoverysf.org, a Web site that seeks to track stimpack funds coming to San Francisco. Although the Web site shows that $150 million of the first quarter-billion of formula funding is headed toward infrastructure projects, it does not include estimates of the numbers of green jobs created.

Wade Crowfoot of the Mayor’s Office told the Guardian that the city is focused on ensuring that green jobs are created with these funds and that the City Attorney’s Office is figuring out what is "allowable" under Recovery Act’s guidelines.

On April 3, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget issued a 172-page memo outlining the Recovery Act’s policy goals. The goals included ensuring compliance with equal opportunity laws and principles, promoting local hiring, providing maximum practicable opportunities for small business and equal opportunities for disadvantaged business, encouraging sound labor practices, and engaging with community-based organizations.

"But will all cities include achievable, measurable requirements?" Crowfoot said. "I don’t think so, without federal guidelines."

This lack of specifics, Crowfoot says, has the City Attorney figuring out if San Francisco can include "first source" hiring requirements, in which hiring halls agree to interview graduates from local training programs first. If so, Crowfoot says, the city will seek to leverage existing funding for energy efficiency programs and conduct hire-locally campaigns in low-income communities.

But as Crowfoot notes, although we know that $1.5 million in ARRA funding is coming to San Francisco for weatherizing homes — helping to decrease the energy costs of low-income residents, reduce the city’s energy demands, and increase the number of people hired from the local community to do energy audits and retrofits — we still don’t know how many jobs will be created per project, which is the basic goal of economic stimulation.

"If we spend the dollars, say, on boiler replacement, that’s more equipment and less labor," Crowfoot said. "But the more you hire locally, the more those folks get experience, the more they’ll be well positioned to get jobs in the non-subsidized sector once the stimulus funds are gone."

Acknowledging the tension between laid-off union workers and graduates of apprentice training programs, Crowfoot said, "We are trying to figure out a balance, whereby the community is not shut out, but the unions’ needs are addressed. We want to be careful about how many jobs we say are going to be created. We don’t want to build hope in populations who already have a lot of mistrust in the government."

Michael Theriault, secretary and treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, told us that 25 percent of the region’s 16,000 building trades workers are out of work, compared to nearly full employment last year.

In the past, the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council provided CityBuild with instructors and took the lion’s share of the program graduates, Theriault explains. But under present conditions, the Council isn’t keen on another CityBuild cycle.

"I think they should work to sponsor another cycle, but the ball is also in the city’s court," Theriault said, noting that the ARRA-funded weatherization program could soon be offering prevailing union wages ($20 an hour for roofers, $40 to $50 for plumbers and electricians) that could help ease the tension. And then there’s the inconvenient truth that some union members view non-unionized solar panel installers as "scabs," creating another barrier to using green jobs to lift the underemployed.

Mayor Newsom has until June to secure and implement stimpack funding as part of upcoming local budget proposals, a timetable that has Green for All issuing a call for action to ensure that Recovery Act implementation creates green-collar jobs, ensures transparency and accountability, and supports pathways out of poverty.

"This may be the most important opportunity you’ll ever have to bring green-collar jobs to your community," Green For All wrote in a public statement. "But the planning process will be over in the blink of an eye, and your community could miss out. That’s why we’re calling on you to take action now."

Green for All field organizer Julian Mocine-McQueen is scheduled to sit down with Crowfoot this week in an effort to get Newsom to sign his group’s pledge. He said there’s been an expansion of the city’s lighting and refrigeration cooling retrofitting program, starting with small business owners who speak English as a second language. "It’s good," McQueen said. "But it’s not enough."

He believes green job success will depend, in part, on including hiring parameters. "A job in the city’s southeast sector may not pay $70,000 a year, but it would be a huge step toward creating a family-sustaining job," McQueen said, noting that the Obama administration has "to a certain extent" adopted Jones’ definition of green-collar jobs. "I’m not sure that they have codified it," McQueen said. "They have recommendations."

Asked to define green jobs during a recent media roundtable on projected budget deficits, Newsom talked about weatherization and sustainability and plans to expand the city’s training academies before handing the floor to the Office of Economic and Workforce Development’s Kyri McClellan, whom he described as his "green czarina."

McClellan, who describes herself as "the lead cat-herder" of Recovery Act funds, told reporters that San Francisco is expected to receive a quarter of a billion dollars in formula funds in the coming fiscal year, 95 percent of which have been allocated to "shovel-ready" projects that were already queued up under the city’s 10-year capital plan.

During a subsequent board committee hearing, McClellan shared job estimates — 30 jobs from the $11 million Department of Public Works street paving allocation and 250 jobs from the $18 million Housing Authority retrofitting allocation — that raised eyebrows.

McClellan said that OEWD is "moving as quickly as possible to take the dollars we’ve been allocated, get approval from the Board of Supervisors, and get programs up and running."

Observing that the city also has parallel funding for training programs such as CityBuild and a Green Academy, McClellan added that "no one is working harder than Rhonda Simmons." Reached by phone, OEWD’s Simmons said she has been working with San Francisco State University professor Raquel Pinderhughes to identify five job sectors that have "the capacity to grow the greatest number of green jobs."

These include solar installation, energy efficiency, landscaping/public greening, recycling, and green building. "In an economy like this, you have to be competitive," Simmons said. "And almost all the programs that come out of my shop are geared toward low-income to moderate-income folks."

Observing that OEWD is using a $238,000 federal earmark to seed a Green Academy and that will expand the GoSolarSF workforce incentive, compete for a $500,000 EPA brownfield cleanup training grant, and coordinate with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to develop "workforce incentive language" for biodiesel reuse program and energy efficiency projects, Simmons notes that it was the unions that helped create CityBuild in the first place, and the city is working to ease current concerns.

"It is our intent as OEWD designs the academy that any training programs must demonstrate that they train individuals for occupations with opportunity for upward mobility," Simmons said, after emerging from a meeting cochaired by Crowfoot and Pinderhughes to help community-based organizations understand green jobs and figure out how to link with the Green Jobs Corps that Pinderhughes set up in Oakland.

Eric Smith runs the Bayview-based Green Depot, a nonprofit that promotes biodiesel use in neighborhoods facing environmental justice issues and ran a $9,000-per intern pilot program with Global Exchange. He worries that administrative costs will chew up much of the stimulus money, citing SFPUC figures that the cost ratio for trainers to interns is about 3:1.

"There is a lot of concern in the Bayview that the money will end up going to consultants and administrators when we have people who are hungry and desperate to work," Smith said.

After two green jobs hearings, Sup. Eric Mar says that he and Sups. Sophie Maxwell and David Chiu have concluded "that unless the board takes action and gives clear guidelines and expectations, green collar job creation will be miniscule."
Noting that Oakland’s Green Job Corps and Richmond’s solar program seem years ahead of San Francisco’s efforts, Mar said his next step will be to talk with labor, environmental groups, businesses, and nonprofits to get a sense of an appropriate structure to prioritize the low-income communities as the main beneficiaries of green-collar job creation. "It’s pretty clear that the [Newsom] administration’s commitment to the numbers of jobs created is pretty small," Mar said. "The community is going to have to push for more."

The budget mysteries

April 8, 2009

sarah@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s top budget advisors are predicting that dollars from President Obama’s stimulus package will help reinvigorate the economy over the next three years. But they also warn that the recovery will be slow, and that deficits will be part of political life for some time to come.

The findings are contained in a three-year budget projection report jointly compiled by the Mayor’s Office, the Controller’s Office, and the Budget Analyst’s Office and released to the news media at a hastily announced March 31 roundtable.

During the roundtable, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that the city faces a "staggering" $438 million budget shortfall in fiscal year 2009-10 — a deficit, financial experts warn, that could balloon to $750 million by fiscal year 2011-12 if cuts and wage concessions aren’t made and structural reform and revenue creating measures aren’t undertaken.

Those future numbers are scary — and a bit apocryphal. Nobody seriously thinks the city will simply ignore this year’s problems and put them off until next year, which means future deficits should be smaller.

But the decisions that will have to be made to keep the red ink under control have been the subject of intense speculation since December, when Newsom announced that the city was facing a deficit equal to cutting every other dollar in the city’s discretionary general fund.

REFORMS? WHAT REFORMS?

In January newly elected Board of Supervisors President David Chiu sought to address the anxiety crashing over the city’s business and labor leaders by inviting stakeholders, including Newsom, to budget meetings at City Hall. But Newsom only agreed to get involved once the youthful board president’s other bright idea — a special election that combined cuts, revenue generating measures, and structural reforms to save as many jobs, programs, and services — was off the table.

And with only two months to go until he submits his 2009-10 budget proposal, Newsom still has not clarified what budgetary reforms he will support this fall, even as the labor unions are being asked to give back $90 million in promised benefits, and the Board of Supervisors gets ready to prepare an annual appropriations ordinance by the end of July.

Newsom did announce last week that he will be is asking some, but not all, departments for 25 percent cuts in the coming fiscal year. Human Services Director Micki Callahan confirmed that 730 pink slips have been sent out since July 2008.

Yet the actual cuts remain a mystery. "I will not be accepting 25 percent cuts from some departments, but from others, I will," Newsom said. "I don’t believe in across-the-board cuts."

Asked which departments he would accept 25 percent cuts from, Newsom told reporters: "You’ll find out when you read my budget."

Within days of Newsom’s statement came news of a deal between the Mayor’s Office and Service Employees International Union Local 1021, the largest city-workers union.

"The goal of this tentative agreement is to protect vital services for San Franciscans, minimize layoffs to employees, preserve the integrity of the collective bargaining agreement, and assist the city with its economic recovery," read a joint public statement.

As of press time, SEIU’s 1021’s Robert Haaland told the Guardian that the two sides are still in negotiations, but confirmed that the union is discussing giving up about $40 million over 16 months, including furloughs and other benefits.

"At the end of the day, our members recognize that they need to share the pain," Haaland said. "The idea is to save jobs and programs."

These givebacks from SEIU are part of the $90 million in concessions the city hopes to get from unions, including those that represent police, firefighters and nurses.

THE PERILS OF TWO-YEAR BUDGETING

As it becomes clear that givebacks and cuts won’t be enough to solve the city’s fiscal crisis, there is talk that the mayor wants to switch to a two-year budget process. Critics say that could represent a massive transfer of power to the Mayor’s Office, unless the Board of Supervisors also gets the power to approve the mayor’s midyear cuts.

"As it is right now, we have power through the Board of Supervisors for one month of the year," said one community organizer, who asked to remain anonymous. "The rest of the time Newsom moves his own agenda through his midyear cuts."

A summary of a March 16 Controller’s Office "budget improvement project" recommends that "the board’s add-back process should require that program restorations and enhancements be reviewed and analyzed by department staff and the board’s budget analyst;" that the "mayor and board should outreach to the general public regarding budget priorities;" and that the "city should adopt a two year budget process consistent with the city’s financial plan."

Sup. Chris Daly said he thinks this year’s grim three-year budget projections make a strong argument against a two-year budget process. "Projections are never right," said Daly, who used to chair the powerful budget committee. "Two years ago we weren’t projecting how bad it was going to be. We can’t do budgets for years out past the current fiscal year. It just doesn’t work."

Sup. David Campos, who sits on the current budget committee, said he wants to see the increased Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) funding being provided to the city’s public health and human services departments used to restore proposed cuts, jobs, and services.

Much of the federal money will be earmarked for non-General Fund infrastructre projects at the Municipal Transporation Agency, Housing Authority, airport, and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

"We’re saying that if FMAP is coming in so that revenue cuts are not made in the public health area, then why not use these monies to fill gaps, replace cuts, restore funds, preserve programs?" Campos asked.

Campos also wants the mayor and the board to sit down and talk about the November ballot. "I don’t think the budget hole is going to be closed on backs of labor alone," Campos told us. "We’re focused on cuts, elimination of programs, layoffs … But why aren’t we talking about what revenue measures we are putting on the November ballot?

Chiu said he thinks Newsom is committed to some form of tax-based revenue measure. "Just as we can’t solve our budget deficit by taxing our way out of it, so we can’t solve it by cutting our way out of it either," Chiu said. "None of our tax or revenue-generating options would come close to filling 25 percent of that gap."

Noting that business is "more open to taxes that share the burden of who pays," Chiu observed that "it’s important to balance the cuts so it’s not just social services and the health department taking the burden."

Green-collar heat

April 1, 2009

› sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Local residents, workers, and businesses are anxious to learn who and what will be stimulated by the billions of dollars that President Barack Obama authorized for release when he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Since January 2008, unemployment in the Bay Area has risen from 4.9 percent to 8.4 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, and house prices and consumer spending are down.

Despite all the anxiety, representatives from local low-income community groups hope to turn Obama’s stimulus package into an opportunity to make local government accountable for creating decent green-collar jobs. And Sups. Eric Mar, John Avalos, Sophie Maxwell, and Board President David Chiu seem happy to help further the community in this environmentally friendly cause.

Mar scheduled a March 23 hearing of the board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee "to obtain community input on the creation of jobs, particularly green-collar jobs, in San Francisco as the city positions itself for federal investment dollars."

"The hearing was the first step toward building a grassroots coalition to hold government accountable," continued Mar, who worries that the Mayor’s Office is not sharing enough information related to the stimulus package. "Labor and community groups, not just department heads and City Hall, should be at the table."

At the hearing, representatives from the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development said that a substantial part of the first wave of stimulus package dollars has already been allocated, mostly to shovel-ready projects such as the Doyle Drive rebuild and massive development projects at Treasure Island and the Hunter’s Point Shipyard.

OEWD representatives also indicated that more waves of formula funding are expected, for which San Francisco must compete with other cities, and that the city’s Department of Technology is constructing a Web site to track all local money from Obama’s $787 billion package.

OEWD deputy director Jennifer Entine Matz says community-based organizations, unions, and community colleges need to work together to ensure that people are successfully brought through any work program. "In many cases, green collar jobs are existing jobs," Matz said. "If we are successful in training people with green power technology, they will be more marketable here and beyond. We can also train and modify people in existing programs."

But representatives from the Chinese Progressive Association, PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights), and POWER (People Organizing to Win Employment Rights) expressed their belief that stimulus package funds should go to help low-income communities, not rich corporations.

"Let’s make sure we stimulate quality to make sure we stimulate the economy," said PODER’s Oscar Grande, who warned against using the funds on low-paid jobs with few advancement opportunities. He and others suggested tracking what communities receive funding. "We want to go past the green hype, the green-washing, and the green lifestyle marketing," Grande said.

Raquel Pinderhughes, an urban studies professor at San Francisco State University who helped Berkeley’s Green Business Council and Oakland’s Green Jobs Corp program, defined green-collar jobs as "blue collar jobs in green businesses.

"Green collar jobs can function to get more people out of poverty," Pinderhughes said. "They can provide living wages. They have low barriers to entry. They provide an opportunity for occupational mobility. They are inherently dignified, and they have a shortage of entry-level workers, so there is room for people."

But Pinderhughes warned that cities must link improving environmental quality to social justice to avoid creating temporary jobs and preserve industrially zoned lands for green-collar jobs. She also said that cities must fund case management services "so folks don’t quickly drop out."

The Land Use Committee has scheduled an April 6 continuation to address a plethora of outstanding issues like how much money is going to specific corporations and departments, the division of funds between public transportation and freeway projects, and how much Lennar Corp. is getting for its Hunters Point Shipyard/Candlestick Point redevelopment project.

Monopoly money

March 24, 2009

sarah@sfbg.com

Employees at the San Francisco Chronicle are anxiously awaiting the March 31 deadline that its owner the Hearst Corp. has set for accepting buyout offers, after which the ax could fall on any employee at any time. The California Media Workers Guild has voted to accept 150 layoffs and to end seniority considerations at the city’s major daily.

Hearst claims that amendments to the union’s contract are essential to avoid closing or selling the 144-year-old paper, although the company refuses to open its books, making it impossible to verify claims that the Chronicle is losing $1 million a week. Rather than challenging that corporate prerogative, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wants to explore allowing a local monopoly like MediaNews to buy the Chronicle, the last major Bay Area newspaper MediaNews doesn’t already own through its Bay Area News Group subsidiary.

In a March 16 letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Pelosi wrote: "I am confident that the antitrust division, in assessing any concerns that any proposed mergers or other arrangements in the San Francisco area might reduce competition, will take into appropriate account, as relevant, not only the number of daily and weekly newspapers in the Bay Area, but also the other sources of news and advertising outlets available in the electronic and digital age, so that conclusions reached reflect current market realities."

Holder responded March 18, telling reporters, "It’s important for this nation to maintain a healthy newspaper industry. So to the extent that we have to look at our enforcement policies and conform them to the reality that the industry faces, that’s something I’m going to be willing to do."

Sara Steffens, chair of the Guild’s Bay Area News Group East Bay unit, recently raised her concerns about that strategy. "Consolidating some or all Bay Area News Group operations with the Chronicle could prove the financial salvation for our struggling newspapers, potentially guarding against bankruptcies or outright shutdown," she wrote on the union’s Web site. "But it could also pave the way for further job loss and erosion of standards."

Justice department lawyers have in the past ruled against mergers that created newspaper monopolies, but media analyst Alan Mutter believes times have changed. "It’s just a question of who is going to qualify," Mutter told the Guardian.

Retired UC Berkeley journalism professor Ben Bagdikian, author of books critical of media monopolies, said the Chronicle‘s "surprising announcement" that it might have to shut down could be a scam. He notes that this news comes "not long after Hearst and [MediaNews owner Dean} Singleton, who owns all the East Bay dailies, formed a partnership to buy media in other parts of the country.

"Hearst a few years ago — granted, in boom times — gifted the Examiner to the Fang family along with a stunning gift of $56 million to the Fangs to take it and make it into a daily," Bagdikian said. "I think it has never before happened in the news business or any other business to pay someone else to compete with them. It was clearly part of a larger plan to get rid of this operating agreement for exemption from antitrust [laws]."

Other critics believe that large newspapers, which are tied to huge printing presses and gas-guzzling delivery trucks, could become extinct, and that nimbler prototypes that deliver news by mobile phone and integrate social networking on their Web sites could assume the old media’s traditional role as public watchdogs.

Jeff Elder, who is studying the newspaper industry as a Knight fellow at Stanford University, told the Guardian, "You either see a daily newspaper as an old railroad station, a really cool part of the city’s history that you maybe can’t afford to save, or an at-risk public school whose continuance is fundamental to democracy."

Elder, a columnist for the Charlotte Observer, was one of a wide variety of media professionals (including Guardian publisher Bruce B. Brugmann), who gathered March 17 in the San Francisco Public Library to discuss the Chronicle‘s future.

"There is no minimizing that it’s a real sad situation for the people being laid off," Elder said. "But there is a real danger in propping up print products by strengthening monopolies. You’re draining off resources while propping up a business model that is becoming increasingly irrelevant."

Opening up

March 11, 2009

› sarah@sfbg.com

Shortly after his election in November 2008, President Barack Obama received a letter from Public Citizen and 59 other nonprofit groups noting that the public’s access to information about the government had been shut down under President George W. Bush.

The groups urged Obama to help "by issuing a presidential memorandum on Day One that makes clear that government information belongs to the people and that directs federal agencies to harness technology and personnel skills to ensure maximum accessibility of government records, consistent with law, regulation, and administrative orders."

Obama responded to these concerns on his second day as president by sending a memo to heads of executive departments and agencies that committed his administration to more transparency and unprecedented disclosures of information.

"In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act, which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government," Obama said, noting that FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: in the face of doubt, openness prevails."

Open government advocates warmly welcomed Obama’s announcement. But 50 days later, as they wait for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to issue new FOIA implementation guidelines, some worry that the new administration may still need more prodding.

Peter Scheer, executive director of the San Rafael–based California First Amendment Coalition (one of the letter’s signatories), told the Guardian that it remains to be seen how Obama’s directive will be implemented.

"The directive is good. The spirit is right. But what really matters is whether more information is turned over to the public on a timely basis," said Scheer, who hopes the Obama administration will explore ways to change the FOIA incentive structure so that agencies have a genuine bias in favor of giving out more information, not less.

"Right now, the incentives are all in favor of withholding information," Scheer explained.

Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told the Guardian that she is looking forward to the U.S. Attorney General’s new FOIA guidelines. "I imagine they will say, ‘If you have discretion to disclose information do so, make a greater effort to meet FOIA deadlines, and put an emphasis on proactively posting stuff online,’" Dalglish predicted.

"The difficulty I see lying ahead is a lack of money to help agencies tackle the backlog of FOIA requests," Dalglish said. "But otherwise, I think we’re going to be in pretty good shape."

Scheer was happy about the Obama administration’s March 2 release of nine highly controversial memoranda and legal opinions that the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared under Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, purporting to authorize warrantless national security wiretaps on U.S. citizens, extrajudicial detention of US citizens suspected of terrorism, and use of the military to conduct counterterrorist operations in the U.S.

In the last days of the Bush administration, DOJ officials claimed that most of these opinions were withdrawn by 2003, but open-government advocates believe their release helps prove the extent to which the Bush regime violated the constitution.

"Let’s just hope Obama is just as amenable to releasing his own legal memoranda, four years from now, as he is to release the prior administration’s more embarrassing documents," added Scheer.

He would also like to see an acceleration of the process for declassifying older national security materials and Federal Bureau of Investigation materials, and hopes that a review of Bush–era DOJ use of the state secrets privilege will "result in a modification or abandonment of that policy, except where absolutely necessary to protect vital national security interests.

"I think everyone became quite reasonably suspicious during the Bush years, when a privilege that was previously rarely invoked was popping up in literally dozens of cases and clearly being overused," Scheer explained.

Yet Dalglish fears that sunshine gains under Obama could be offset by the demise of mainstream newspapers.

"If the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer join Denver’s Rocky Mountain News in closing this year, the United States will be in a world of trouble in the future in terms of fighting for greater openness and transparency in government," Dalglish opined. "For the last 50 years, the mainstream media, not the alternative press, has been waging most of these battles pushing for open government."

The Chronicle death watch

March 3, 2009

› sarah@sfbg.com

Is San Francisco really the frontrunner in the race to become the first major U.S. city to go without a major daily? Or is it a victim of disaster capitalism, in which powerful corporations exploit economic meltdowns to exact otherwise unacceptable concessions from employees and/or antitrust legislators?

Media critics chewed on those questions last week, following Hearst Corporation’s abrupt Feb. 24 announcement that it is undertaking "critical cost-saving measures including a significant reduction in the number of its unionized and non-unionized employees" at the San Francisco Chronicle, and will close or sell the paper, which has 1,500 employees, 275 in the newsroom, unless these changes occur within weeks.

Noting that the Chronicle lost more than $50 million in 2008 — the worst in a string of nonstop losses the paper has suffered since Hearst bought it in 2000 — Hearst vice chairman and chief executive officer Frank A. Bennack Jr. and Hearst Newspapers president Steven R. Swartz warned that "without the specific changes we are seeking across the entire Chronicle organization, we will have no choice but to quickly seek a buyer for the Chronicle or, should a buyer not be found, to shut the newspaper down."

Two days later, the California Media Workers Guild, which represents workers at the Chronicle, reported that Hearst is seeking "a combination of wide-ranging contractual concessions in addition to layoffs, the exact number of which the company said it did not yet have."

"For Guild-covered positions, the company did say the job cuts would at least number 50," read a Guild statement. "Other proposals include removal of some advertising sales people from Guild coverage and protection, the right to outsource — specifically mentioning ad production — voluntary buyouts, layoffs and wage freezes."

Guild representative Carl Hall said he doesn’t see any reason to think Hearst’s threats are a bluff.

"The Rocky Mountain News just closed in Denver," Hall told the Guardian. "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which is also owned by Hearst, is slated to close in March, if a buyer isn’t found. We’ve seen bankruptcies and disaster scenarios all around the country, and the Chronicle has experienced some of the deepest operating losses in the nation."

Reached for comment March 2, Chronicle publisher Frank Vega told the Guardian, "We’re still in the process," while Guild treasurer George Powell said that "proposals have been exchanged and each side is evaluating them."

WHERE’S THE MONEY?

Evaluating Hearst claims is hardly an easy task. A privately held corporation, Hearst doesn’t open its books to the public. But one thing is clear, just from reading postings on the corporation’s Web site: Hearst is midway through a squeeze in which it’s trying to turn a profit on the 15 newspapers it owns throughout the country.

And that means more syndicated stories — and possibly the end of free newspaper Web sites.

As Swartz outlined in a recent press release, all Hearst newspapers will be required to allow for "efficient production or common content sharing," use "outbound telemarketing and self-service ad platforms more effectively," increase their subscription rates, outsource printing, and charge for digital content.

"Exactly how much paid content to hold back from our free sites will be a judgment call made daily by our management," Swartz stated. "Our goal is a business model that seeks, by 2011, to get more than 50 percent of our revenue from circulation revenue and digital advertising sales."

And the same day that Chronicle workers learned that their newspaper might be facing the axe, Hearst cut 75 out of 135 newsroom positions at the San Antonio Express-News in Texas.

As San Antonio Express-News editor Robert Rivard told his staff, "Incremental staff and budget cuts, we are sorry to say, have proven inadequate amid changing social and market forces now compounded by this deepening recession."

"It’s like death in here today," a source, who asked to remain anonymous, said. "Everyone who was laid off is still here, working ’til March 20."

And like the growing pool of newsroom refugees nationwide, the survivors of this San Antonio massacre have since met to brainstorm about other newsgathering business models.

"We all have kids, so we need salaries and insurance," our source confided, "but we’re going to start researching some options, see what’s working and not in other places. The time is ripe."

THE SINGLETON SCENARIO

Meanwhile, sources within the Chronicle — who asked to remain anonymous given the ongoing negotiations — claim that there isn’t much hope that Hearst will come up with innovative solutions, but that there is a chance the paper could be sold to Dean Singleton, the only other major Bay Area newspaper publisher.

Singleton’s MediaNews Group owns the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times, and has lost several antitrust cases in recent years. Any deal with the Chronicle would require Department of Justice approval — and would give one owner control of nearly every daily newspaper in the Bay Area.

The media baron refuses to comment on whether he is considering buying the Chronicle.

"We’ll just watch it play out," Singleton told Editor and Publisher’s senior editor, Joe Strupp, last week. "I am not going to speculate on what could happen."

But, as Strupp noted, "MediaNews remains highly leveraged."

Hearst Corporation currently holds a substantial amount of MediaNews debt, owns 31 percent of MediaNews Group newspapers outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, and recently took control of four Connecticut papers that MediaNews was managing for Hearst.

Former Chronicle city editor Alan Mutter believes Singleton could still be in the running.

Observing on his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog that "To wipe out a $50 million loss, let alone make a profit, the [Chronicle] would have to eliminate 47 percent of its entire staff," Mutter later clarified that he believes it’s "extremely unlikely" that the Chronicle will reduce its staff to that extent.

"But, it will try to do some serious cost cutting, and it could be sold, potentially, to MediaNews, because Singleton would not necessarily be expected to put up any money," wrote Mutter, noting that hundreds of people involved in the Chronicle‘s advertising operations could be eliminated if Singleton took over, since ads for MediaNews’ papers are already assembled in India. Another motivation for Hearst to find someone to take over the Chronicle lies in the multimillion dollar printing plant that Hearst just built.

"But no one expects the business to break even now," Mutter said. "If you want to make $20–<\d>$30 million profit over the long term, that’s not a good outcome for a business that has lost $1 billion in recent years."

Michael Stoll, director of the Public Press project, which seeks to launch a nonprofit daily paper, told us he thinks it would be "a real tragedy" if Hearst followed through on any of its Chronicle threats.

"Most San Francisco journalism is generated by reporters at the Chronicle, and its few competitors would be ill-prepared to step in and immediately fill the void," Stoll said.

Concerned that Singleton’s MediaNews could try to make the case that there is a crisis and that the Department of Justice should therefore waive antitrust prohibitions against monopoly ownership, Stoll warned that "the expansion of MediaNews ownership to nearly every other paper in the Bay Area in the last two years has proven to be an unmitigated disaster in terms of a less independent voice from Santa Cruz to Santa Rosa, and from San Mateo to Contra Costa."

The Society of Professional Journalists is calling for a public discussion of Hearst’s threats.

Worried that additional cuts to the Chronicle "will only exacerbate what SPJ perceives as an already growing vacuum of credible reporting and will further limit scrutiny of our public institutions," Northern California SPJ board president Ricardo Sandoval observed that closing the Chronicle "would mean losing the largest source of news for hundreds of thousands of readers in the San Francisco Bay Area."

Asking Hearst to participate in "a high-profile conversation with its community based on the imperative of reinvention," Sandoval said, "We urge journalists, foundations, corporations, the public, and public officials to join us in finding solutions to this increasingly urgent civic challenge."

As University of California at Berkeley journalism professor Bill Drummond warns, "this is not just the decline of the industry. If the mainstream media, which is supposed to be balanced and fair, goes away, if that scrutiny is no longer there, everything will be more partisan and narrower.

"And in this atmosphere where everyone is begging the government to fund their industry, what about the fourth estate?" Drummond said. "Maybe we need the newspaper equivalent of public broadcasting, with pledge drives and bake sales."

The wheels come off

February 17, 2009

› sarah@sfbg.com

Criticism of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s handling of the city’s budget crisis has intensified since the mayor refused to attend consensus-building sessions at City Hall, instead choosing to promote his gubernatorial bid and push a flawed "local economic stimulus package" that will only make the deficit larger.

The wheels began to come off Newsom’s public relations machine when news hit that Newsom refused to attend roundtables that board president David Chiu convened to discuss the city’s financial emergency. These meetings marked the first time business and labor leaders were brought together since the mayor announced the city’s $575 million deficit two months ago.

"I’ve asked the mayor to convene these meetings, but obviously that hasn’t happened," Chiu told the Guardian last week. "He has said he plans to convene them soon."

Insiders say Chiu was told that the mayor, his chief of staff, and his budget analyst will not attend the roundtables until a June special election is off the table, but that Newsom is open to considering revenue measures for a November election. As a compromise, Chiu proposed moving the election to late summer.

Mayoral spokesperson Nathan Ballard told the Guardian that the mayor has been holding a series of meetings with labor, business, elected officials, and community leaders on the budget, but Ballard hasn’t yet fulfilled the Guardian‘s Sunshine Ordinance request for details and documents connected to those meetings.

"Some of those meetings have included Supervisor Chiu and other supervisors," Ballard said. "However, the mayor is not scheduled to attend meetings about a summer special election to raise taxes, which he opposes."

That position places Newsom squarely with the business community, which continues to maintain that it is too early to develop revenue measures and that structural budget reforms should be considered first.

On Jan. 29, Steve Falk, executive director of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, wrote to Chiu that "Any action to call a special election without the specifics of proposed tax measures and Charter amendments would be premature and doomed to failure. City government can take steps that either help to stimulate a quick recovery or, through the wrong actions, extend the downturn by placing greater burdens on local employers."

But labor groups believe that revenue boosts are necessary if San Francisco is to weather the economic tsunami, and that it’s unreasonable to demand that their members give back millions in negotiated pay raises while forgoing revenue options. These concerns, attendees report, are publicly aired at Chiu’s roundtables, and Newsom’s refusal to participate has left city workers feeling alienated.

"He wants Labor to come to the table, but the problem is, his whole approach is all stick and no carrot, all doom and gloom and no hope that there is revenue on the horizon," SEIU Local 1021’s Robert Haaland told the Guardian.

Noting that labor anticipates 2,500 layoffs in the coming year, on top of the 400 city workers who were laid off this month, Haaland said, "Our people provide frontline services. This is about the wheels of government coming off."

Sup. Bevan Dufty, who participated in Chiu’s roundtables with Sups. John Avalos and Sean Elsbernd, praised Chiu for bringing together stakeholders, even as he extended hope that Newsom will assume the leadership role. "It always helps to have people face-to-face," Dufty said. "David primed the pump, got people to start talking. I’m looking forward to the mayor taking it to the next level."

Dufty said Newsom was "disappointed with the board’s override of his veto [of the June special election], doesn’t see a June election working, and doesn’t understand why the board is reluctant to let it go…. But from our point of view, it’s hard to ask employees to give back $90 million in negotiated benefits if they are going to be laid off in three months anyway."

Falk, who represents almost 2,000 local businesses, wrote that "The business community recognizes that a $500 million budget shortfall can only be bridged through a combination of reductions in the size of city government, program consolidations, work-rule reforms, and new fees and revenues. However, any solution must be the product of discussions with all affected parties at the table. To date, these meetings have not happened."

Chiu replied to that letter by inviting key business and labor groups to his Feb. 8 City Hall roundtable. Attendees report that a productive dialogue ensued, and two days later, when the board overturned Newsom’s veto of its special election legislation, the impacts of that first roundtable were palpable.

"I respect the mayor’s perspective, but I believe that by getting on with the election, less damage will be done," Chiu explained as the supervisors pushed ahead with their plans to hold a special election this summer.

Elsbernd opposed the election but expressed frustration with the current situation: "The city is facing a multi-year problem. People are missing the big picture here. I don’t want to be part of brokering a deal that is simply going to be a Band-Aid. Let’s fix the problems now. "

"You could tell the impact of Sean having sat in on the discussions," Dufty observed. "Instead of ‘Get over it, this is the way it’s going to be,’ he understands that we have to work together."

Falk told the Guardian that he found Chiu’s roundtable "very productive."

"Everyone is feeling the pain of this recession," Falk continued. "People are losing jobs, businesses are losing sales, which results in layoffs, which results in a bigger strain on the city’s services. It’s all connected."

But he also noted that a special election on taxes requires a two-thirds vote. "That is a very difficult hurdle," Falk noted, "which is why we have to consider all the pieces, and as we do, the more we realize that June is out of the question."

Chiu continues to reach out to his critics, countering arguments that a special election will cost $3.5 million — and will be impossible to do by summer — with the observation that, done right, it could result in $50 million to $100 million in additional revenues and thereby spare some vital jobs and programs.

"We’re facing a $565 million budget deficit, so if we can raise $100 million, we’ll still have to cut $465 million. But it would save us from making the most painful cuts," Chiu said, noting he would support pushing the election to no later than Aug. 31 "if there were more firm agreement on elements of a plan that must include structural reforms, layoffs and wage concessions, and new revenues."

But Ballard said, "The mayor doesn’t support more revenue without real reform," while promising that Newsom would shortly announce "new cost-saving reforms."

Unveiled the next morning, Feb. 11, during a mayor’s breakfast with business leaders, Newsom’s so-called local economic stimulus package included more spending on tourism marketing, targeted reduction in the payroll and property taxes, a $23 million interest-free revolving loan program for local businesses, and tax relief for Healthy San Francisco participants. The package, which must be approved by the board, would actually increase the city’s budget deficit.

Chiu says he is open to discussing most ideas in Newsom’s economic stimulus package, but that he’s concerned about widening the deficit, telling us, "That is why this needs to be done in the context of an overall revenue package and not in a vacuum."

Public safety adrift

February 11, 2009

› sarah@sfbg.com

Shortly into his first term as mayor, Gavin Newsom told a caller on talk radio — who was threatening to start a recall campaign if the mayor didn’t solve the city’s homicide problem — that Newsom might sign his own recall petition if he didn’t succeed in reducing violent crime.

But Newsom didn’t reduce violence — indeed, it spiked during his tenure — nor did he hold himself or anyone else accountable. Guardian interviews and research show that the city doesn’t have a clear and consistent public safety strategy. Instead, politics and personal loyalty to Newsom are driving what little official debate there is about issues ranging from the high murder rate to protecting immigrants.

The dynamic has played out repeatedly in recent years, on issues that include police foot patrols, crime cameras, the Community Justice Court, policies toward cannabis clubs, gang injunctions, immigration policy, municipal identification cards, police-community relations, reform of San Francisco Police Department policies on the use of force, and the question of whether SFPD long ago needed new leadership.

Newsom’s supporters insist he is committed to criminal justice. But detractors say that Newsom’s political ambition, management style, and personal hang-ups are the key to understanding why, over and over again, he fires strong but politically threatening leaders and stands by mediocre but loyal managers. And it explains how and why a vacuum opened at the top of the city’s criminal justice system, a black hole that was promptly exploited by San Francisco-based U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello, who successfully pressured Newsom to weaken city policies that protected undocumented immigrants accused of crimes.

Since appointing Heather Fong as chief of the San Francisco Police Department in 2004, Newsom has heard plenty of praise for this hardworking, morally upright administrator. But her lack of leadership skills contributed to declining morale in the ranks. So when he hired the conservative and controversial Kevin Ryan as director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice — the only U.S. Attorney fired for incompetence during the Bush administration’s politicized 2006 purge of the Department of Justice, despite Ryan’s statements of political loyalty to Bush — most folks assumed it was because Newsom had gubernatorial ambitions and wanted to look tough on crime.

Now, with Fong set to retire and a new presidential administration signaling that Russoniello’s days may be numbered, some change may be in the offing. But with immigrant communities angrily urging reform, and Newsom and Ryan resisting it, there are key battles ahead before San Francisco can move toward a coherent and compassionate public safety strategy.

SHIFTING POLICIES

The combination of Ryan, Fong, and Newsom created a schizophrenic approach to public policy, particularly when it came to immigrants. Fong supported the sanctuary city policies that barred SFPD from notifying federal authorities about interactions with undocumented immigrants, but Ryan and many cops opposed them. That led to media leaks of juvenile crime records that embarrassed Newsom and allowed Russoniello and other conservatives to force key changes to this cherished ordinance.

Russoniello had opposed the city’s sanctuary legislation from the moment it was introduced by then Mayor Dianne Feinstein in the 1980s, when he serving his first term as the U.S. Attorney for Northern California. But it wasn’t until two decades later that Russoniello succeeded in forcing Newsom to adopt a new policy direction, a move that means local police and probation officials must notify federal authorities at the time of booking adults and juveniles whom they suspect of committing felonies

Newsom’s turnabout left the immigrant community wondering if political ambition had blinded the mayor to their constitutional right to due process since his decision came on the heels of his announcement that he was running for governor. Juvenile and immigrant advocates argue that all youth have the right to defend themselves, yet they say innocent kids can now be deported without due process to countries where they don’t speak the native language and no longer have family members, making them likely to undertake potentially fatal border crossings in an effort to return to San Francisco.

Abigail Trillin of Legal Services for Children, cites the case of a 14-year-old who is in deportation proceedings after being arrested for bringing a BB gun to school. "He says he was going to play with it in the park afterwards, cops and robbers," Trillin says. "His deportation proceedings were triggered not because he was found guilty of a felony, but because he was charged with one when he was booked. He spent Christmas in a federal detention facility in Washington state. Now he’s back in San Francisco, but only temporarily. This boy’s family has other kids, they are part of our community. His father is a big, strong man, but every time he comes into our office to talk, he is in tears."

Another client almost got referred to U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) even though he was a victim of child abuse. And a recent referral involved a kid who has been here since he was nine months old. "If the mayor genuinely wants to reach out to the immigrant community, he needs to understand how this community has perceived what has happened," Trillin said. "Namely, having a policy that allows innocent youth to be turned over to ICE."

Social workers point out that deporting juveniles for selling crack, rather than diverting them into rehabilitation programs, does nothing to guarantee that they won’t return to sell drugs on the streets. And making the immigrant community afraid to speak to law enforcement and social workers allows gangs and bullies to act with impunity.

"This is bad policy," Trillin stated. "Forget about the rights issues. You are creating a sub class. These youths are getting deported, but they are coming back. And when they do, they don’t live with their families or ask for services. They are going far underground. They can’t show up at their family’s home, their schools or services, or in hospitals. So the gang becomes their family, and they probably owe the gang money."

Noting that someone who is deported may have children or siblings or parents who depend on them for support, Sup. John Avalos said, "There need to be standards. The city has the capability and knows how to work this out. I think the new policy direction was a choice that was made to try and minimize impacts to the mayor’s career."

But Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office, told the Guardian that the Sanctuary City ordinance never did assure anyone due process. "The language actually said that protection did not apply if an individual was arrested for felony crimes," Dorsey said. "People have lost sight of the fact that the policy was adopted because of a law enforcement rationale, namely so victims of crime and those who knew what was going on at the street level wouldn’t be afraid to talk to police."

Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus, along with the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee, a coalition of more than 30 community groups, has sought — so far in vain — to get the city to revisit the amended policy. "The city could have reformulated its ordinance to say that we’ll notify ICE if kids are found guilty, do not qualify for immigration relief, and are repeat or violent offenders," Chan said. "That’s what we are pushing. We are not saying never refer youth. We are saying respect due process."

Asked if Newsom will attend a Feb. 25 town hall meeting that immigrant rights advocates have invited him to, so as to reopen the dialogue about this policy shift, mayoral spokesperson Nathan Ballard told the Guardian, "I can’t confirm that at this time."

Sitting in Newsom’s craw is the grand jury investigation that Russoniello convened last fall to investigate whether the Juvenile Probation Department violated federal law. "Ever since the City found out that the grand jury is looking into it, they brought in outside counsel and everything is in deep freeze," an insider said. "The attitude around here is, let the whole thing play out. The city is taking it seriously. But I hope it’s a lot of saber rattling [by Russoniello’s office]."

Dorsey told the Guardian that "the only reason the city knew that a grand jury had been convened was when they sent us a subpoena for our 1994 opinion on the Sanctuary City policy, a document that was actually posted online at our website. Talk about firing a shot over the bow!"

Others joke that one reason why the city hired well-connected attorney Cristina Arguedas to defend the city in the grand jury investigation was the city’s way of saying, ‘Fuck You, Russoniello!" "She is Carole Migden’s partner and was on O.J. Simpson’s dream team," an insider said. "She and Russoniello tangled over the Barry Bonds stuff. They hate each other."

Shannon Wilber, executive director of Legal Services for Children, says Russoniello’s theory seems to be that by providing any services to these people, public or private, you are somehow vioutf8g federal statutes related to harboring fugitives. "But if you were successful in making that argument, that would make child protection a crime," Wilber says, adding that her organization is happy to work with young people, but it has decided that it is not going to accept any more referrals from the Juvenile Probation Department.

"We no longer have the same agenda," Wilber said. "Our purpose in screening these kids is to see if they qualify for any relief, not to deport people or cut them off from services."

Wilber’s group now communicates with the Public Defender’s Office instead. "Between 80 and 100 kids, maybe more, have been funneled to ICE since this new policy was adopted," Wilber said. "This is creating an under class of teens, who are marginalized, in hiding and not accessing educational and health services for fear of being stopped and arrested for no good reason, other than that their skin is brown and they look Latino".

Wilber understands that the new policy direction came from the Mayor’s Office, in consultation with JPD, plus representatives from the US Attorney’s office and ICE. "They bargained with them," Wilber said. "They basically said, what are you guys going to be satisfied with, and the answer was that the city should contact them about anyone who has been charged and booked with a felony, and who is suspected of being undocumented."

She hopes "something shifts" with the new administration of President Barack Obama, and that there will be "enough pressure in the community to persuade the Mayor’s Office to at least amend, if not eliminate, the new policy," Wilber said "The cost of what the city is doing, compared to what it did, is the flashing light that everyone should be looking at."

"It costs so much more to incarcerate kids and deport them, compared to flying them home," she explained. "And we have cast a pall over the entire immigrant community. It will be difficult to undo that. Once people have been subjected to these tactics, it’s not easy to return to a situation of trust. We are sowing the seeds of revolution."

WEAKEST LINK

When Newsom tapped Republican attorney Kevin Ryan to head the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice a year ago, the idea was that this high-profile guy might bring a coherent approach to setting public safety policy, rather than lurch from issue to issue as Newsom had.

Even City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who isn’t considered close to Newsom, praised the decision in a press release: "In Kevin Ryan, Mayor Newsom has landed a stellar pick to lead the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. Kevin has been a distinguished jurist, an accomplished prosecutor, and a valued partner to my office in helping us develop protocols for civil gang injunctions. San Franciscans will be extremely well served by the talent and dedication he will bring to addressing some of the most important and difficult problems facing our city."

But the choice left most folks speechless, particularly given Ryan’s history of prosecuting local journalists and supporting federal drug raids. Why on earth had the Democratic mayor of one of the most liberal cities in the nation hired the one and only Bush loyalist who had managed to get himself fired for being incompetent instead of being disloyal like the other fired U.S. Attorneys?

The answer, from those in the know, was that Newsom was seriously flirting with the idea of running for governor and hired Ryan to beef up his criminal justice chops. "If you are going to run for governor, you’ve got to get to a bunch of law and order people," one insider told us.

Ryan proceeded to upset civil libertarians with calls to actively monitor police surveillance cameras (which can only be reviewed now if a crime is reported), medical marijuana activists with recommendations to collect detailed patient information, and immigrant communities by delaying the rollout of the municipal identity card program.

"In the long run, hopefully, dissatisfaction with Ryan will grow," Assembly Member Tom Ammiano told us last year when he was a supervisor. "He could become a liability for [Newsom], and only then will Newsom fire him, because that’s how he operates."

Others felt that Ryan’s impact was overstated and that the city continued to have a leadership vacuum on public safety issues. "What has happened to MOCJ since Ryan took over?" one insider said. "He doesn’t have much of a staff anymore. No one knows what he is doing. He does not return calls. He has no connections. He’s not performing. Everyone basically describes him with the same words – paranoid, retaliatory, and explosive – as they did during the investigation of the U.S. attorneys firing scandal."

"I’ve only met him three times since he took the job," Delagnes said. "I guess he takes his direction from the mayor. He’s supposed to be liaison between Mayor’s Office and the SFPD. When he accepted the job, I was, OK, what does that mean? He has never done anything to help or hinder us."

But it was when the sanctuary city controversy hit last fall that Ryan began to take a more active role. Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Eileen Hirst recalls that "MOCJ was essentially leaderless for five years, and Ryan was brought in to create order and revitalize the office. And the first thing that really happened was the controversy over handling undocumented immigrant detainees."

One prime example of Ryan’s incompetence was how it enabled Russoniello to wage his successful assault on the city’s cherished sanctuary ordinance last year. Internal communications obtained by the Guardian through the Sunshine Ordinance show efforts by the Newsom administration to contain the political damage from reports of undocumented immigrants who escaped from city custody.

Newsom solidly supported the Sanctuary City Ordinance during his first term, as evidenced by an April 2007 e-mail that aide Wade Crowfoot sent to probation leaders asking for written Sanctuary City protocols. But these demands may have drawn unwelcome attention.

"This is what caused the firestorm regarding undocumented persons," JPD Assistant Chief Allen Nance wrote in August 2008 as he forwarded an e-mail thread that begins with Crowfoot’s request.

"Agreed," replied probation chief William Siffermann. "The deniability on the part of one is not plausible."

Shortly after Ryan started his MOCJ gig, the Juvenile Probation Department reached out to him about a conflict with ICE. They asked if they could set up something with the U.S. Attorney’s Office but the meeting got canceled and Ryan never rescheduled it.

Six weeks passed before the city was hit with the bombshell that another San Francisco probation officer had been intercepted at Houston Airport by ICE special agents as he escorted two minors to connecting flights to Honduras. They threatened him with arrest.

"Special Agent Mark Fluitt indicated that federal law requires that we report all undocumenteds, and San Francisco Juvenile Court is vioutf8g federal law," JPD’s Carlos Gonzalez reported. "Although I was not arrested, the threat was looming throughout the interrogation."

Asked to name the biggest factors that influenced Newsom’s decision to shift policy, mayoral spokesperson Nathan Ballard cites a May 19 meeting in which Siffermann briefed the mayor about JPD’s handling of undocumented felons on matters related to transportation to other countries and notification of ICE.

"That morning Mayor Newsom directed Siffermann to stop the flights immediately," Ballard told the Guardian. "That same morning the mayor directed Judge Kevin Ryan to gather the facts about whether JPD’s notification practices were appropriate and legal. By noon, Judge Ryan had requested a meeting with ICE, the U.S. Attorney, and Chief Siffermann to discuss the issue. On May 21, that meeting occurred at 10:30 a.m. in Room 305 of City Hall."

Ballard claims Ryan advised the mayor that some of JPD’s court-sanctioned practices might be inconsistent with federal law and initiated the process of reviewing and changing the city’s policies in collaboration with JPD, ICE, the U.S. Attorney, and the City Attorney.

Asked how much Ryan has influenced the city’s public safety policy, Ballard replied, "He is the mayor’s key public safety adviser."

Records show Ryan advising Ballard and Ginsburg to "gird your loins in the face of an August 2008 San Francisco Chronicle article that further attacked the city’s policy. "Russoniello is quoted as saying, "This is the closest thing I have ever seen to harboring,’" Ryan warned. And that set the scene for Newsom to change his position on Sanctuary City.

PUSHED OR JUMPED?

When Fong, the city’s first female chief and one of the first Asian American women to lead a major metropolitan police force nationwide, announced her retirement in December, Police Commission President Theresa Sparks noted that she had brought "a sense of integrity to the department." Fellow commissioner David Onek described her as "a model public servant" and residents praised her outreach to the local Asian community.

Fong was appointed in 2004 in the aftermath of Fajitagate, a legal and political scandal that began in 2002 with a street fight involving three off-duty SFPD cops and two local residents, and ended several years later with one chief taking a leave of absense, another resigning, and Fong struggling to lead the department. "It’s bad news to have poor managerial skills leading any department. But when everyone in that department is waiting for you to fail, then you are in real trouble," an SFPD source said.

Gary Delagnes, executive director of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, hasn’t been afraid to criticize Fong publicly, or Newsom for standing by her as morale suffered. "Chief Fong has her own style, a very introverted, quiet, docile method of leadership. And it simply hasn’t worked for the members of the department. A high percentage [of officers] believe change should have been made a long time ago."

But Newsom refused to consider replacing Fong, even as the stand began to sour his relationship with the SFPOA, which has enthusiastically supported Newsom and the mayor’s candidates for other city offices.

"The day the music died," as Delagnes explains it, was in the wake of the SFPD’s December 2005 Videogate scandal. Fong drew heavy fire when she supported the mayor in his conflict with officer Andrew Cohen and 21 other officers who made a videotape for a police Christmas party. Newsom angrily deemed the tape racist, sexist, and homophobic at a press conference where Fong called the incident SFPD’s "darkest day."

"Heather let the mayor make her look like a fool. Who is running this department? And aren’t the department’s darkest days when cops die?" Delagnes said, sitting in SFPOA’s Sixth Street office, where photographs and plaques commemorate officers who have died in service.

Delagnes supports the proposal to give the new chief a five-year contract, which was part of a package of police reforms recommended by a recent report that Newsom commissioned but hasn’t acted on. "You don’t want to feel you are working at the whim of every politician and police commission," Delagnes said. But he doubts a charter amendment is doable this time around, given that the Newsom doesn’t support the idea and Fong has said she wants to retire at the end of April.

"I’d like to see a transition to a new chief on May 1," Delagnes said. "And so far, there’s been no shortage of applications. Whoever that person is, whether from inside or outside [of SFPD], must be able to lead us out of the abysmally low state of morale the department is in."

Delagnes claims that police chiefs have little to do with homicide rates, and that San Francisco is way below the average compared to other cities. "But when that rate goes from 80 to 100, everyone goes crazy and blames it on the cops. None of us want to see people killed, but homicides are a reality of any big city. So what can you do to reduce them? Stop them from happening."

But critics of SFPD note that few homicide cases result in arrests, and there is a perception that officers are lazy. That view was bolstered by the case of Hugues de la Plaza, a French national who was living in San Francisco when he was stabbed to death in 2007. SFPD investigators suggested it was a suicide because the door was locked from the inside and did little to thoroughly investigate, although an investigation by the French government recently concluded that it was clearly a homicide.

Delagnes defended his colleagues, saying two of SFPD’s most experienced homicide detectives handled the case and that "our guys are standing behind it."

A NEW DIRECTION?

Sparks said she didn’t know Fong was planning to retire in April until 45 minutes before Chief Fong made the announcement on Newsom’s December 20 Saturday morning radio show. "I think she decided it was time," Sparks told the Guardian. "But she’s not leaving tomorrow. She’s waiting so there can be an orderly transition."

By announcing she will be leaving in four months, Fong made it less likely that voters would have a chance to weigh in on the D.C.-based Police Executives Reform Forum’s recommendation that the next SFPD chief be given a five-year contract.

"The mayor believes that the chief executive of a city needs to have the power to hire and fire his department heads in order to ensure accountability," Newsom’s communications director Nathan Ballard told the Guardian.

According to the city charter, the Police Commission reviews all applications for police chief before sending three recommendations to the mayor. Newsom then either makes the final pick, or the process repeats. This is same process used to select Fong in 2004, with one crucial difference: the commission then was made up of five mayoral appointees. Today it consists of seven members, four appointed by the mayor, three by the Board of Supervisors.

Last month the commission hired Roseville-based headhunter Bob Murray and Associates to conduct the search in a joint venture with the Washington-based Police Executive Research Forum, which recently completed an organizational assessment of the SFPD. Intended to guide the SFPD over the next decade, the study recommends expanding community policies, enhancing information services, and employing Tasers to minimize the number of deadly shootings by officers.

"The mayor tends to favor the idea [of Tasers] but is concerned about what he is hearing about the BART case and wants closer scrutiny of the issue," Ballard told us last week.

Potential candidates with San Francisco experience include former SFPD deputy chief Greg Suhr, Taraval Station Captain Paul Chignell, and San Mateo’s first female police chief, Susan Manheimer, who began her career with the SFPD, where her last assignment was as captain of the Tenderloin Task Force.

"It would be wildly premature to comment on the mayor’s preference for police chief at this time," Ballard told the Guardian.

Among the rank and file, SFPD insider Greg Suhr is said to be the leading contender. "He’s very politically connected, and he is Sup. Bevan Dufty’s favorite," said a knowledgeable source. "The mayor would be afraid to not get someone from the SFPD rank and file."

Even if Newsom is able to find compromise with the immigrant communities and soften his tough new stance on the Sanctuary City policy, sources say he and the new chief would need to be able to stand up to SFPD hardliners who push back with arguments that deporting those arrested for felonies is how we need to get rid of criminals, reduce homicides, and stem the narcotics trade.

"The police will say, you have very dangerous and violent potential felons preying on other immigrants in the Mission and beyond," one source told us. "They would say [that] these are the people who are dying. So if you are going to try and take away our tools — including referring youth to ICE on booking — then we will fight and keep on doing it."

While that attitude is understandable from the strictly law and order perspective, is this the public safety policy San Francisco residents really want? And is it a decision based on sound policy and principles, or merely political expediency?

Sup. David Campos, who arrived in this country at age 14 as an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, says he is trying to get his arms around the city’s public safety strategy. "For me, the most immediate issue is the traffic stops in some of the neighborhoods, especially in the Mission and the Tenderloin," said Campos, a member of the Public Safety Committee whose next priority is revisiting the Sanctuary City Ordinance. "I’m hopeful the Mayor’s Office will reconsider its position. But if not, I’m looking at what avenues the board can pursue.

"I understand there was a horrible and tragic incident," Campos added, referring to the June 22, 2008 slaying of three members of the Bologna family, for which Edwin Ramos, who had cycled in and out of the city’s juvenile justice system and is an alleged member of the notoriously violent MS-13 gang, charged with murder for shooting with an AK-47 assault weapon. "But I think it is bad to make public policy based on one incident like that. To me, the focus should be, how do we get violent crime down and how do we deal with homicides?"

Campos believes Ryan has sidetracked the administration with conservative hot-button issues like giving municipal ID cards to undocumented residents, installing more crime cameras, and cracking down on the cannabis clubs. "I’m trying to understand the role of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice," Campos said, raising the possibility that it might be eliminated as part of current efforts to close a large budget deficit. "In tough times, can we afford to have them?"

The change in Washington could also counter San Francisco’s move to the right. Federal authorities, swamped by claims of economic fraud and Ponzi schemes, might lose interest in punishing San Francisco for its Sanctuary City-related activities now that President Barack Obama has vowed to address immigration reform, saying he wants to help "12 million people step out of the shadows."

"It’s hard to believe that there isn’t going to be some kind of change," another criminal justice community source told us. "A lot of this is Joe Russoniello’s thing. Sanctuary City ordinances and policies have been a target of his for years."

Rumors swirled last week that Russoniello might have already received his marching orders when Sen. Barbara Boxer announced her judicial nomination committees, which make recommendations to Obama for U.S. District Court judges, attorneys, and marshals.
Boxer will likely be responsible for any vacancies in the northern and southern districts, while Feinstein, who is socially friendly with the Russoniello family, will take charge of the central and eastern districts. Criminal justice noted that Arguedas, who San Francisco hired to defend itself against Russoniello’s grand jury investigation, is on Boxer’s Northern District nomination committee.
Boxer spokesperson Natalie Ravitz told the Guardian she was not going to comment on the protocol or process for handling a possible vacancy. "What I can tell you is that Sen. Boxer is accepting applications for the position of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District (San Diego), a position that is considered vacant," Ravitz told us. "Sen. Feinstein is handling the vacancy for the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District. Beyond that I am not going to comment. If you have further questions, I suggest you call the Department of Justice press office."
DOJ referred us to the White House, where a spokesperson did not reply before press time. Meanwhile Russoniello has been publicly making the case for why he should stay, telling The Recorder legal newspaper in SF that morale in the U.S. Attorney’s San Francisco office is much improved, with fewer lawyers choosing to leave since he took over from Ryan.
That’s small consolation, given widespread press reports that Ryan had destroyed morale in the office with leadership that was incompetent, paranoid, and fueled by conservative ideological crusades. Now the question is whether a city whose criminal justice approach has been dictated by Ryan, Fong, and Newsom — none of whom would speak directly to the Guardian for this story — can also be reformed.

Concrete plans

February 4, 2009

› sarah@sfbg.com

In the fractious atmosphere that dominates meetings concerned with Lennar’s plan to redevelop the economically depressed southeast sector of San Francisco, reality is relative to one’s perspective on this ambitious project.

At these meetings, competing factions within the Bayview’s predominantly African American community typically accuse each other — as well as the mostly white engineers, planners, and scientists that Lennar and the city hired to flesh out the details of their vaguely worded but voter-approved conceptual framework — of being sellouts and traitors.

The Jan. 28 meeting, where two local advisory committees endorsed Lennar’s draft urban design plan for a 770-acre Candlestick Point/Hunters Point Shipyard development, was typical. It was held at the Southeast Community Facility, within sniffing distance of a seismically suspect sewage treatment plant.

The committee’s endorsement came at the end of a meeting that was full of what critics labeled "disingenuous claims" by representatives from Lennar, the Mayor’s Office, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, and the city’s Planning Department; recriminatory accusations by community members; and disruptive chants of "A-B-Uuuu!" by a female member of Aboriginal Blackmen United, who claimed that ABU members have been starved for work at Lennar’s development. Records show Lennar paid ABU trainees $11,300 in fiscal year 2005–06 for work at the Shipyard’s Parcel A.

Fanning the flames was a report that local environmental nonprofit Arc Ecology released last month. Arc’s report faults Lennar’s urban design plan for not including comparisons with realistic alternatives and for failing to study the cumulative impact of the 15 developments, covering 1,500-2,000 acres, currently underway on the eastern waterfront.

"The practice of ‘island’ development prevents the city from conceiving a cohesive vision for the east waterfront," Arc Ecology’s January 15 report states. "Moreover, the piecemeal approach cannot adequately address the practical consequences of the addition of 50,000 new residences to the area."

Noting that Lennar’s proposal calls for a 60 percent increase in the neighborhood’s population as more than 20,000 new residents join the 33,000 people who already live in the neighborhood, Arc’s report lists alternatives that "would strengthen the economic, social and environmental benefits, while avoiding and reducing some significant impacts."

Financed by a California Wellness Foundation grant, Arc’s report stressed that it does not disagree with the stated objectives of Lennar’s development plan as laid out in Proposition G, which voters approved in June. In fact, the organization did little to voice its concerns before the election.

But the report has ruffled the feathers of city leaders, who seem hell-bent on moving the project forward and applying for funding from the federal economic stimulus package. The report calls for a focus on doing "bottom-up" ecological planning, creating real economic opportunities for the Bayview community, relocating the proposed football stadium, and removing the shipyard’s highly contaminated Parcel E2 from the project.

Noting that Lennar’s environmental impact report has yet to be completed, and that there has been no time to study Arc’s report, Citizens Advisory Committee member Scott Madison argued that delaying the endorsement would have no impact on Lennar’s home building or job creation schedule. "It’s not going to slow down anyone getting a job by even one day if we take a few days," Madison said. "But once we approve this — even a draft, even if folks are amenable to some changes — it has a certain kind of semi-concrete to it that’s difficult to chip away."

CAC member Diana Oertel voiced her objections to Lennar’s plan to divide the 170-acre Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, the Bayview’s only large open space that provides a place for recreation and an escape from urban living. "It’s not acceptable to me to see that area cut in half, gentrified, prettified, with housing going to edge of the park," Oertel said.

Project Area Committee member Leon Muhammad said there was no way the urban design plan should be endorsed "until we have addressed all the issues, until they come up with a complete plan that makes sense, not a half-baked plan."

But then PAC member Cedric Jackson asked to hear from folks in the audience who were hungry for jobs — at which point ABU folks yelled and raised hands. "I saw 80 percent of the community stand up and say, move this process forward," Jackson then asserted. "In 2000, we were 70 percent of the community, now we’re less than 50 percent. There is an out-migration and it’s not because we don’t like San Francisco, but we’re being forced out economically. So the longer you delay, the less of us will be there, especially with the economic conditions we’re facing."

Seconded by PAC member Gary Banks, Jackson moved to endorse Lennar’s draft design plan as-is, with only PAC members Muhammad and Kristine Enea, and CAC members Oertel, Madison, and Carmen Kelley dissenting.

Reached after the meeting, ARC Ecology’s Saul Bloom acknowledged that many of the problems people face in the Bayview are related to "tension over jobs." Yet he was surprised by the strong-arm tactics by proponents of a project that won’t generate jobs for at least another year.

"There’s this blind panic, this belief that if you hold up anything, you are going to stop the whole plan," Bloom told the Guardian. He hopes that now that the vote has passed, the city and Lennar will make good on verbal promises, made before and during the Jan. 28 meeting, to review Arc Ecology’s report.

"As Scott Madison pointed out, if we’d listened to these same we-have-to-vote-yes-now voices the last time around, when we were asked to endorse Phase A, we’d never have gotten the community-benefits program," Bloom said, adding that many of the current committee members are new and inexperienced. "So it’s hard for them to see through the rhetoric and pain."

"None of us want to derail the plan," continued Bloom, whose group also receives funding from the SFRA, which is overseeing the project. "What incentive do we have? Do we want to piss off the developers, contractors, and commissioners when our contract is up?"

"The city is under the impression that there is a broad base of support for this project, by virtue of Prop. G," Bloom said. "But they are unaware of the depth of dissatisfaction citywide with this project. People are saying, ‘this is insane.’<0x2009>"

Bloom believes ARC’s report raised the ire of city leaders because they feared it would fall into the wrong hands and be used in a political campaign. "But I believe the city has let the community down by not facilitating a dialogue," Bloom observed.

In addition to questions about location of the stadium, the design of the park, the bridge over Yosemite Slough, and plans to cap a radiologically impacted landfill on Parcel E2, Bloom says the hidden story in all of this is the "unstudied cumulative impacts of the all the city’s development projects on the eastern waterfront."

Together, these projects will create 30,000 new units and attract 50,000 new residents, with Lennar’s CP/HPS development creating 10,500 units, 75 percent of which are slated to sell at market-rate prices, with condos beginning at the $500,000 mark.

"Lennar can’t possibly think they can build this number of houses and sell them at these prices, at least not for the next four years," Bloom said. "The city should have had a public dialogue about the stadium options instead of pulling a plan directly off the shelf that a reliable stadium development firm did. They say they’ve studied all these other options, but where are the studies?"

Bloom notes that Prop. G was not a mandate to build a bridge over Yosemite Slough, and that the city is currently miscounting the parks and open space acreage.

"You wonder why people have no faith," Bloom said. "To whom did the city make the overwhelming case about the park, or about putting a bridge over the slough? It seems their attitude was, ‘Bayview is a crummy neighborhood, so let’s bulldoze and rebuild it,’ whereas we look at the park and say it’s a promise unfulfilled."

He believes that Arc’s recommendation to remove Parcel E2 is a no-brainer: "You are protecting public health and the environment, creating jobs that help people pay their mortgages, and you are making the property more marketable, so value increases."

With the city having publicly committed to reviewing Arc’s material, Bloom is hopeful that the city will put the results of that study into the EIR. "We are not promoting any particular outcome," Bloom said, observing that if Lennar builds 10,000 units, BVHP will no longer be a predominantly African American neighborhood. "We are trying to be the entity that raises the difficult questions that people in city have felt, but [have] been afraid to voice, because they fear those questions will be used to stop the project in its entirety."

Reached by phone, Michael Cohen of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development noted that Lennar’s draft urban-design plan was completed five months ago, has been vetted extensively, and now includes 32 specific modifications based on those hearings.

"These are issues that will be addressed further," Cohen said of Arc’s report. "Some are infeasible, based on extensive technical studies. But we believe that if there is a stadium, it’s in absolutely the right position and that ARC doesn’t have an alternative plan. They haven’t done the necessary studies and they haven’t presented alternative plans that actually work."

As for Arc’s contention that Parcel E2 could be dug up and hauled out, Cohen notes that the city is in a legally binding agreement with the United States Navy, which is obligated to clean up the shipyard to a standard consistent with the city’s intended use. "We don’t control what the remedy is…. [If state and federal environment regulators] say the Navy has got to dig and haul so we can safely use it as a waterfront park, then that’s what they’ll do."

Cohen insisted that the Alice Griffith public housing project will be rebuilt, whether the 49ers stay or not, and that Lennar’s project will invest $10 million to turn "a grossly underused state park into a site comparable to Crissy Field."

Ending war

January 20, 2009

› sarah@sfbg.com

As Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama takes the reins of power, the peace movement is watching to see if he will follow through on foreign policy campaign promises — and preparing to apply pressure if he doesn’t.

CodePink has compiled a list, "President Obama’s Promises to Keep," taken from his campaign statements on which activists intend to hold him accountable. These promises include a pledge to end the war on Iraq, close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, reject the Military Commissions Act (which critics say violates the civil rights of people deemed enemy combatants), adhere to the Geneva Convention, work to eliminate nuclear weapons, support direct diplomacy with Iran without preconditions, and abide by international treaties.

But as CodePink’s Media Benjamin noted in an article that was published in the Huffing ton Post last summer, the peace movement helped Obama beat Sen. Hillary Clinton, who supported the invasion of Iraq, in the primaries — only to see Obama begin talking tough on Afghanistan and pledging to essentially escalate the war there.

"This has come back to hit us in the face during Barack Obama’s Middle East trip, where he called for sending 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan," Benjamin observed, noting the high death tolls of both US soldiers and innocent Afghans almost eight years after the US invasion.

"The Taliban has gained new strength, opium production has soared, and Osama bin Laden has not been found," Benjamin wrote. "And amid it all, Afghan people continue to be among the poorest in the world, its women continue to be oppressed and the US has not succeeded in rebuilding Afghanistan."

But Benjamin acknowledged that it’s not enough to simply say "troops out now."

"We, the peace movement, need to come together and develop a strategy before our troops are sent from the ‘bad war’ in Iraq to the ‘good war’ in Afghanistan," Benjamin warned.

Given Obama’s naming of Clinton as his Secretary of State and his pledge to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Benjamin reiterated her belief that increasing troop levels is not going to help subdue a country that has resisted invasions from the likes of Genghis Khan and the Soviet Union.

"Yes, it’s a complex region, but what has history taught us about it?" Benjamin told the Guardian last week. "That foreigners get defeated. Yes, maybe by increasing troops they’ll get to stay for a few more years, but in the end, they leave with their tail between their legs, having suffered more deaths and without imposing their will."

"Theirs is a very tribal culture, so it’s not easy to get a centralized government," added Benjamin, who first visited Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, at the height of the US-led invasion. "And the oppression of women, unfortunately, preceded the Taliban."

Observing that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has admitted to engaging in low-level talks with the Taliban, which the Saudis helped broker, Benjamin claimed that "plenty of US military reps know that a negotiated settlement is the way forward."

"Our concern is that women will be at the table when that happens and that women’s issues and rights are at the front," Benjamin stressed. "So, we want a negotiated settlement with a more moderate faction of the Taliban. And troops going into Pakistan isn’t the solution, either."

Benjamin, who attended Clinton’s Jan. 13 Secretary of State confirmation hearings, says she got the sense that Obama’s administration wants a policy overhaul.

"So, yes, we are sending 30,000 more troops, but we are not pretending it is a surge, à la Iraq. It’s more of a holding pattern," Benjamin said. "We are hoping this is going to be an administration that disengages. Maybe the focus in the US on the economy will help."

A press release sent out on the eve of Obama’s inauguration by Courage to Resist and Direct Action to Stop the War, a San Francisco–based organization that coordinated nonviolent opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, stated that both groups are urging the new President not to escalate the war in Afghanistan, to stop attacks inside Pakistan, and to cut military aid to governments that violate human rights or international law, "such as Israel, in what Amnesty International calls an ‘unlawful attack’ on Gaza."

The release came just days after Clinton said, during her confirmation hearing, that she and Obama "understand and are deeply sympathetic to Israel’s desire to defend itself under the current conditions, and to be free of shelling by Hamas rockets. However, we have also been reminded of the tragic humanitarian costs of conflict in the Middle East, and pained by the suffering of Palestinian and Israeli civilians."

"This must only increase our determination to seek a just and lasting peace agreement that brings real security to Israel; normal and positive relations with its neighbors; and independence, economic progress, and security to the Palestinians in their own state," Clinton elaborated, adding that Obama is committed to "responsibly ending the war in Iraq and employing a broad strategy in Afghanistan that reduces threats to our safety and enhances the prospect of stability and peace."

In the November 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, Barnett Rubin, director of Studies at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University and Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy, outlined the steps that they believe are critical for those serious about ending the ongoing chaos in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond.

Stating that sending more troops to Afghanistan "would be insufficient to reverse the collapse of security there," the authors opined that "A major diplomatic initiative involving all the regional stakeholders in problem-solving talks and setting out road maps for local stabilization efforts is more important."

Arguing that such an initiative would reaffirm that the West as a whole is committed to the long-term rehabilitation of Afghanistan and the region, they recommended that the West — with support from if not led by the US — back that commitment with measures to address economic development, job creation, the drug trade, and border disputes.

"The goal of the next US president must be to put aside the past, Washington’s keenness for "victory" as the solution to all problems, and the United States’ reluctance to involve competitors, opponents, or enemies in diplomacy," Rubin and Rashid wrote. "

But the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition is reemphasizing the importance of building an independent people’s movement and ending imperialist occupations, wherever and whenever they occur. "We are for immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan," San Francisco–based A.N.S.W.E.R. organizer Saul Kanowitz told us. "There are those in the Obama administration who say that Iraq is the wrong war, in the wrong place, but we are against all US imperial conquests abroad."

Noting that he doesn’t believe there is a fundamental difference between Bush’s and Obama’s policies on Afghanistan, Kanowitz says, "It’s just a tactical difference … withdrawing US troops from direct engagement with Iraq, because they don’t believe US can’t win there, and redeploying them to Afghanistan, where they believe they can — it’s the same strategy. It’s about maintaining dominance.

Six aren’t enough

January 13, 2009

› news@sfbg.com

The historic Jan. 8 vote electing Sup. David Chiu as president of the Board of Supervisors — rare for its elevation of a freshman to the post and unprecedented for a Chinese American — clearly illustrates the ideological breakdown of the new board.

The six supervisors who claim membership in the progressive movement (Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, David Campos, John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Chiu) gave Chiu the presidency after their efforts to give it to Mirkarimi or Avalos fell short, while the other five supervisors voted for Sup. Sophie Maxwell in each of the seven rounds, refusing to support any of the progressive picks.

But there are limits to what a bare majority of supervisors can do in San Francisco, particularly when the mayor is threatening vetoes and the city is wrestling with a budget deficit of gargantuan proportions. Overriding a mayoral veto or approving some emergency measures requires eight votes.

So the first question is whether Mirkarimi and Daly can come together after their split divided progressives and led to Chiu as a compromise candidate. But the second, more important, question for progressives is whether they can attract swing votes such as Maxwell and Bevan Dufty when the need arises.

The answers to those questions could start coming immediately as supervisors consider proposals to close a looming $575 million budget gap, including the proposal for a special election on revenue measures in June. Mayor Gavin Newsom opposes that election, so the board would have to muster eight votes in the next month to move forward with it.

They might even need more than that. A confidential memo to supervisors and the mayor by the City Attorney’s Office that was obtained by the Guardian sorts out the complex requirements needed to approve new taxes, including the requirement of unanimous board approval to place tax measures that can be passed with a simple majority vote on the ballot this year.

So President Chiu, who pledges to bring his colleagues together, certainly has his work cut out for him.

POLITICS AND POLICY

Achieving a unanimous vote on anything significant or controversial seems impossible right now. Mirkarimi is unhappy with Daly for thwarting his presidential ambitions; Maxwell and Dufty are unhappy with progressives for keeping her out of their club; and Chiu must quickly learn his new job during a time of unprecedented turmoil.

Chiu told his colleagues that he was “incredibly humbled” by an election that he didn’t think he’d win, and said that he is “acutely aware that I am new to the institution and the body.” But observers say Chiu’s temperament, intelligence, and connections to both the business community and the progressive movement could serve the city well right now.

“I think Chiu is a great choice. He has the humility that will help him,” outgoing Sup. Jake McGoldrick told the Guardian.

This compromise pick for president was praised by all sides, from the progressive coalition that feted him after the vote at a party at the SoMa club Temple. Rob Black, government affairs director for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, told reporters that “David seems to be someone who is very willing to listen and willing to ask questions.”

“We have a progressive supervisor running the board,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian as he walked back to his office following the vote. Or, as Daly told us, “In the end, the progressive coalition stuck together and I’m happy about that.”

Walking back to Room 200 after the vote, Newsom told reporters that Chiu was “an outstanding choice” who represents “a fresh air of progress.” Asked whether he expects to have a better working relationship with Chiu than with outgoing president Aaron Peskin, Newsom replied, “That’s a gross understatement.”

“We’re looking forward to working with the new Board of Supervisors,” Newsom spokesperson Nathan Ballard told the Guardian after the vote. “The mayor has a long relationship with David Chiu. In fact, he was on our short list to be named assessor just a few years ago.”

Yet at the progressive party that night, Chiu sounded like a rock-solid member of that group, promising to help Mirkarimi with police reform, Campos with protecting undocumented city residents, Mar with strengthening city ties to the schools, and Avalos with safeguarding progressive budget priorities.

“I think this is the best outcome we could have,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian shortly after Chiu was elected. “I was the deciding vote that delivered Sup. David Chiu, the first Asian American president of the board. That doesn’t mean that the seasoned experience of Maxwell and myself wasn’t hard to pass by.”

In fact, both Dufty and Maxwell groused about the progressive bloc’s opposition to Maxwell, noting her positions on issues such as public power, affordable housing, and transportation issues. “The people that voted for me did so because they felt I would at least listen to them,” Maxwell told us, expressing frustration at not being accepted “by the board’s progressive clique” which, she noted, “are all males.”

“I think David will be great,” Dufty told the Guardian. “Obviously there was a desire to have someone strongly aligned with the progressive movement. I think it’s a mystery that Sophie isn’t considered part of the progressive movement.”

Progressives are going to have to work at resolving those differences if they are going to play a leadership role in the midyear budget cuts and prevent an expansion of the bloc of five supervisors who stuck with Maxwell and often align with the mayor.

“There has been tension between Ross and myself, but also between Sophie and Ross,” Daly told us. “Sophie is feeling that she might be a progressive, too. And some of the things we do on the board need eight votes. The rift between Ross and I is little. The real question is, when do we get Bevan and Sophie back?”

After fending off a progressive challenger in his reelection bid two years ago, Dufty seemed to move to the left, only to return to Newsom’s centrist faction — which mixes social liberalism with fiscal conservatism — in the last year. He prevented progressives from being able to override a mayoral veto of their decision to cancel $1 million in funding to Newsom’s Community Justice Center. And on Jan. 6, the old board delayed a vote on a mayoral veto of an ordinance that amends the Planning Code to require Conditional Use hearings and permits for any elimination of existing dwelling units through mergers, conversions, or demolitions of residential units, something sought by the tenant groups that are an important part of the progressive coalition.

Those issues, and the thicket that is the budget debate, illustrate what Daly admitted to us last week: “We can’t run this city with six votes.”

THE BUDGET MESS

The most pressing problem facing the new board is the budget, which requires $125 million in midyear cuts for the current fiscal year and will be an estimated $575 million out of balance for the fiscal year that begins in June. Chiu’s first move to deal with it — one lauded by progressives — was to name Avalos as budget chair.

“John Avalos has more experience on budget issues than me,” Daly, who chaired the Budget Committee for two years, said of his former board aide. But even Avalos was awestruck by the tsunami of bad budget news hitting the city, telling us, “I was visibly shaken.”

Mirkarimi and Elsbernd, the Budget Committee’s two other current members, also admit they face a daunting task.

“We can’t put a Band-Aid on the problem,” Elsbernd told the board last week. “This is not just about San Francisco now, but about San Francisco 20 years from now. We need to think about the next generation.”

Mirkarimi agrees with Elsbernd, at least in terms of the enormity of the problem.

“We cannot be incrementalist. We can’t dance around the edges,” Mirkarimi told his colleagues, shortly after making the surprise announcement that he’s expecting a child in April with Venezuelan soap opera star Eliana López, who he’s dated since meeting her last year at a Green Party conference in Brazil. Elsbernd and his wife are also expecting their first child.

Progressives strongly argue that such a large budget deficit can’t be closed with spending cuts alone, so one of Peskin’s final acts was to create legislation calling a special election for June 2 and having supervisors hold hearings over the next month to choose from a variety of revenue measures, but Newsom and the business community opposed the move.

“Basically, it’s not fully baked. It will take a citywide coalition (à la Prop. A) to win something like this and the coalition just hasn’t been built yet,” Ballard told the Guardian. Even Mirarimi echoed the sentiment, telling the Guardian, “I’m not opposed to a June election, but you can’t put something on the June ballot that’s half-baked because I doubt we could win in November if we put something half-baked on in June. My preference is that we work harder to create alliances to assure a healthy chance of getting something on the ballot and delivering a victory.”

Yet many progressives and labor leaders say it’s important to bring in new revenue as soon as possible, particularly because the cuts required by the current budget deficit would slash about half the city’s discretionary spending and devastate important initiatives like offering health coverage to all San Franciscans.

“For Healthy San Francisco to survive, the Department of Public Health has to have a minimum level of funding,” said Robert Haaland, a labor representative with the public employee union SEIU Local 1021. “Given the cuts that have been proposed, it’s not going to survive.”

While Peskin was criticized for acting prematurely, the City Attorney’s Office memo indicated that he couldn’t have waited and still allowed supervisors to play the lead role in determining what ended up on the June ballot. The memo was requested by Daly.

“In response to your specific inquiry about maximizing the amount of time a committee could deliberate the underlying measures and ensuring that the Board would have enough time to override a Mayoral veto, the emergency ordinance and the resolution calling for the special election should be introduced today,” the City Attorney’s Office wrote Jan. 6, the day Peskin introduced his revenue package.

Even then, supervisors would need to vote to waive certain election procedures, such as the 30-day hold for proposed ballot measures, and to move expeditiously forward with hearings, selection of the tax measures, and preparation of findings related to the special election and declaration of fiscal emergency.

The City Attorney’s Office wrote that the package needs final approval by Feb. 17. “We recommend that to meet this deadline, the Board adopt the resolution at its January 27 meeting and that the Mayor sign the resolution no earlier than February 2,” they wrote.

But Newsom has indicated that he would veto it, thus requiring eight supervisors to override. “Aaron had the right to do what he did, but in some ways he rushed the discussion, so it’s been a bit rockier than it otherwise might have been,” Dufty told us, noting that he’s still open to supporting a June ballot measure. “There is no way to avoid spending cuts, and we need more revenues and more givebacks from public employees … I think labor is spending a significant amount of time with the mayor, and he’s making a strong effort to work with the board. I’m trying to encourage us all to work together to the maximum extent possible.”

In fact, San Francisco Labor Council director Tim Paulson told the Guardian he couldn’t talk about the tax measures yet because of intense ongoing discussions. Ballard said Newsom might be open to tax measures in November, telling the Guardian, “Ideally we could do it all by streamlining government, reducing spending, etc. But the mayor lives in the real world and so he is open to the possibility of a revenue measure with a broad base of support.”

So, can the new board president help coalesce the broad base of support that he’ll need to avoid cuts that would especially hurt the progressive base of unions, tenants, social service providers, affordable housing activists, and others who believe that government plays an important role in addressing social problems and inequities?

“In light of the global meltdown, national slowdown, local crisis, and largest budget deficit in history, I believe this board understands the importance of unity and working together,” Chiu told his colleagues. “We don’t have time for the politics of personality when we have the highest murder rate in 10 years, when businesses are failing, and the budget deficit grows exponentially.”

Unsteady ground

December 30, 2008

› sarah@sfbg.com

If you’ve been tracking Lennar Corp.’s massive redevelopment project at Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco, then you probably know that several years ago, after the Florida-based megadeveloper won an exclusive negotiating agreement with the city, it formed a limited liability company, Lennar-BVHP, LLC, to handle operations on Parcel A of the former naval shipyard.

Parcel A is the only parcel of the shipyard that the Navy has released to the city as cleaned up and ready for development. And since "Lennar-BVHP" pops up in court filings related to the developer’s failures to properly monitor asbestos at Parcel A — failures that led Lennar to enter into a half-million dollar settlement with the local air district in July — that entity has been central to activists’ efforts to uncover the giant developer’s local business secrets.

So we noted with interest the fact that that "Lennar-BVHP" has now sold its development rights at Candlestick and the Shipyard to "HPS Development Co., LLC" — just as an environmental review is being prepared of the entire shipyard, including some of its most toxic and radiologically impaired hot spots.

The transaction took place quietly in August, but was mentioned at a Dec. 16 meeting of the San Francisco Redevelopment Commission, during which the Agency authorized a reimbursement-related amendment to the "Lennar-BVHP-HPS Development Co." acquisition agreement.

During this same Dec. 16 meeting, the SFRC also amended a contract with environmental consultants PBS&J/EIP Associates to add tasks and increase the budget so as to complete the long-awaited environmental review of the combined Hunters Point Shipyard/Candlestick development project. Until the EIR is complete and certified, nothing can move forward.

But before we get to the implications of the environmental review for Lennar’s proposed Candlestick Point/Shipyard development, it’s worth rewinding the tape to early 2008 to clarify just how, why, and when Lennar-BVHP became HPS Development — and what that transfer means.

BIG-SPENDING DEVELOPER

In the first six months of 2008 (see "Promises and reality," 04/23/08), Lennar spent more than $5 million to help ensure the victory of Proposition G, which folded the Shipyard and Candlestick Point into one huge redevelopment project, one that could include a new stadium for the 49ers.

And just as urban planners were beginning to wonder if Lennar really would be able to sell proposed luxury condominium complexes on heavily polluted Shipyard land — in the face of a nationwide real estate nosedive — the Irvine-based investment and development company Scala Real Estate Partners announced, in February 2008, that it had signed a multimillion-dollar letter of intent related to Lennar-BVHP’s development.

Founded by former executives of the Perot Group’s real estate division, Scala said it planned to invest up to $200 million — and have equal ownership interests — in the project.

The investment fulfilled a city-issued mandate that Lennar find a financial backer to guarantee its proposed multibillion-dollar project, regardless of market conditions.

Then this fall, Lennar demanded and got approval from the Redevelopment Commission for an additional 500 homes and a 7.5 percent increase in its profit margins (see "Bait and Switch," 11/05/08), as part of an Oct. 27 draft financing plan for the Candlestick Point/Shipyard proposal.

But at the time that this financing plan was negotiated, Lennar-BVHP had, in fact, already sold all of its title and interest in the project land and assigned all its rights and obligations under the related financing documents to HPS Development Co., LP, which filed a business license with the state on Aug. 28.

Records filed with the California Secretary of State show that HPS Development Co., LP, lists yet another limited liability company, CP/HPS Development Co., GP, LLC, which filed a license with the state on Dec. 11, as its general partner. Lennar Urban’s Kofi Bonner is listed as the authorized person for CP/HPS development. And HPS Development Co., LP’s office address is listed as being c/o Lennar Urban’s 49 Stevenson Street, Suite 600 address.

Land-use lawyer Sue Hestor told the Guardian that the move to form HPS Development Co., LP suggests that Lennar ran out of money.

"Forming a limited liability company means that people are just putting their money into that project," Hestor said. "It’s a way to segregate it from other projects."

TOXIC MELTDOWN

The Redevelopment Agency also renegotiated the terms of its contract with consultants PBS&J for an environmental review of the combined Hunters Point Shipyard/Candlestick Development Project Dec. 16th — and the results of that study could shed light on some very scary prospects.

According to Redevelopment Commission documents, the Agency and Planning Department staff, working with the Mayor’s Office, have dentified a number of additional tasks that are necessary to adequately complete this review.

These include the addition of an "analysis of windsurfing off Candlestick Point and evaluations of greenhouse gases and sea-level rise."

The most interesting part of the study, however, may be the analysis of geology and soils, to be prepared by Geotechnical Consultants, Inc. That report will look at the phenomenon known as liquefaction — the tendency of landfill to melt into liquid during a major earthquake.

The development zone is situated on a heavily polluted Superfund site, within a stone’s throw from an existing residential community.

As the executive summary in the Redevelopment Commission’s Dec. 16 agenda, notes: "The Project Areas are underlain predominantly by historic artificial fill with moderate to high liquefaction potential, followed by tidal flats and bay mud deposits that are typically soft, weak, and highly compressible…. These include temporary soil/slope instability caused by grading; erosion potential and increased hazards produced by potential failure of foundation support; and strong seismic groundshaking."

Just what kind of liquefaction risks are involved?

According to a February 2005 memo from Navy environmental coordinator Keith Forman to the Hunters Point Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board, the USGS Hazard Zone Map, which represents potential liquefaction risks, is intended for planning purposes and is not intended to be site specific.

"It depicts the general risk within neighborhoods and the relative risk from community to community," stated Forman.

But that report concluded that during a 7.9 earthquake, Parcel E-2, which is the landfill site where an underground fire burned for months in 2000, may have a lateral shift of 4 to 5 feet and a settlement of about 10 inches.

"This amount of lateral shift and settling could cause some small breaches in a containment remedy, but would be quickly and easily repairable," Forman added.

But the Navy and the city are proposing to cap Parcel E-2, rather than excavate and remove contaminants, which are thought to include PCBs and radionuclides — and there’s some fear that Hunters Point could be the next Hurricane Katrina when the inevitable major earthquake hits.

Members of the Health and Environment/Education Committee of the Bayview Hunters Point Project Area Committee invited Thomas L. Holzer of the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park to give a Dec. 5 beginner’s course in liquefaction — and his remarks were grounds for some serious concern.

Dressed in a gray and white tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, Holzer described how "sand becomes like liquid, capable of flowing" during an earthquake.

"More importantly, where you have groundwater contamination, fluids are discharged to the surface of the contaminated water, from a depth of 40 to 50 feet," Holzer said.

Noting that according to the USGS, a 6.7 earthquake has a 62 percent chance of hitting the region in the next 30 years, Holzer told the crowd, "If it is close enough to Hunters Point, then it’s probably enough to trigger liquefaction in susceptible materials."

In theory, then, the toxic material that the city buried under a cap could become a major hazard. "The soil liquefies, the ground gets to slosh around, and because movement isn’t always uniform, you can get cracks," he said.

As Holzer told the Guardian after the meeting, "Different people and different entities will issue different levels of risk. For some, everything has to do with profitability. So, San Francisco has some soul searching to do. Is it worth it to fast-track a project that has the potential to impact the whole city, should a major earthquake hit? Because then it would no longer be just about Bayview–Hunters Point."

Wise words, given the reality that Lennar continues to hurt financially.

"In 2009, cash generation will continue to be our top priority," Lennar president and CEO Stuart Miller said Dec. 18, as Lennar’s fourth quarter revenues showed a 41 percent decrease.

"We will convert inventory to cash and reduce both our land purchases and homebuilding starts," Miller promised, blaming falling home prices, increased foreclosures, tighter credit, and volatile equity markets for eroding consumer confidence, depressing home sales, and furthering the decline of the housing market.

Up against ICE

December 23, 2008

› sarah@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee, a newly formed coalition of more than 30 community groups, is asking Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors to sign a pledge supporting San Francisco’s immigrant community.

By signing the pledge, city officials would agree to uphold the city’s sanctuary ordinance, ensure that San Francisco police officers don’t act like immigration agents, and denounce racial profiling. They would also agree to denounce Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and ensure that immigrant youth get due process, that funding for immigrant communities continues, and that the city announce a specific date for implementing San Francisco’s municipal identification program.

The move could put Newsom in an awkward situation — the mayor doesn’t want to appear to be snubbing immigrant-rights leaders, but he also has moved in the past few months to distance himself from the city’s liberal sanctuary law.

So far the coalition has not heard back from Newsom, but some supervisors-elect and returning supervisors have already signed it, and the Mayor’s Office has signaled that the municipal identification program will kick in Jan. 15.

The move to get elected officials to sign a pledge comes at the end of a difficult year for the immigrant community. In May, the federal government challenged San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance after immigration agents stopped a city juvenile probation officer in Houston.

The officer, who was repatriating a group of Honduran youths who had been busted for selling crack, believed he was acting in accordance with city’s policy. The federal agents, who took the young people into custody, eventually released the officer.

And it wasn’t long before US Attorney Joseph Russoniello, a staunch opponent of the sanctuary ordinance, convened a grand jury to see whether the city used the sanctuary policy to harbor immigrant felons from federal prosecution.

The city countered this attack by hiring high-powered criminal defense lawyer Cris Arguedas. But by then the damage to the city’s sanctuary policy had already been done: in June, someone leaked the details of confidential juvenile court cases to the San Francisco Chronicle. One day after the story hit the newsstands, Newsom — who until then was a staunch sanctuary ordinance supporter — did an about-face, announcing that he would require city officials to refer youth suspected of being undocumented and of having committed a felony to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) even before they have a hearing.

Immigrant rights groups decried Newsom’s new direction, calling it an overly broad policy that had the potential to lead to deporting innocent people who may not have family or relatives in their county of origin.

As Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus pointed out, based on Juvenile Probation Department data, in 2006 there were 288 petitions filed against Latin American juveniles, but only 211 were sustained. Had Newsom’s policy been in place, 77 juveniles who weren’t actually found to have committed a felony in San Francisco could have been reported to ICE when they were booked and might have been wrongly deported.

While Newsom’s gubernatorial ambitions were blamed for his sudden change of heart, critics also pointed the finger at his criminal justice director, Kevin Ryan. A Republican loyalist, Ryan was the only US Attorney to be fired for cause during US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ infamous purge of the Justice Department in December 2006.

His December 2007 hiring by Newsom was seen as a calculated move to make the mayor-who-would-be-governor look tough on crime and immigrants — cards that play well among voters in more conservative parts of the state.

It didn’t help that Ryan’s hiring coincided with Russoniello’s second term as US Attorney for the Northern District of California.

Public records obtained by the Guardian show that as the Chronicle series unfolded, Ryan and Newsom’s communications director, Nathan Ballard, began to question whether the city should even fund programs or organizations that serve undocumented youth.

With ICE raids intensifying — May 2 at El Balazo Taqueria, Sept. 11 at a private residence — and the community accusing the police of racial profiling, the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee chose Dec. 18, International Migrants Day, to publicize its pledge.

As of press time, Newsom has refused to meet with the committee, and Chan from the Asian Law Caucus, told us that members are "feeling snubbed."

But Chan reports that SFPD Chief Heather Fong, who announced Dec. 20 that she will be retiring in April, 2009, did meet and listen to the coalition’s concerns. "She reiterated her position that the SFPD only collaborates when ICE is seeking a specific list of people," Chan said.

With Fong under attack from within her own department for her refusal to let officers collaborate with ICE, the community is now abuzz with rumors that a hardliner could now be handed the chief’s reins.

Meanwhile, Supervisor-elect John Avalos and Sups. David Campos and Chris Daly have signed the pledge, while Supervisor-elect Eric Mar and Sup. Bevan Dufty have signed modified versions. And at the Dec. 18 Migrants Day protest, Sups. Jake McGoldrick and Ross Mirkarimi and Supervisor-elect David Chiu (who noted that Sup. Carmen Chu, while absent from the rally, is an immigrant rights supporter) joined gay rights and labor and religious leaders in announcing support for the coalition’s platform, which seeks to make dignity, equality, and due process a reality for all San Franciscans, including immigrants.

As Eric Quezada, Dolores Street Community Services executive director, told the crowd, "We’re here to defend the fundamental human rights of all immigrants." *

P.S. The San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee is a growing alliance encompassing immigrant rights advocates, labor groups, faith leaders, and LGBT activists. The committee includes the ALDI, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Asian Law Caucus, Asian Youth Advocacy Network, Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, Central American Resource Center, Chinese for Affirmative Action, Communities United Against Violence, EBASE, Global Exchange, H.O.M.E.Y., Filipino Community Center, Instituto Familiar de la Raza, La Raza Centro Legal, La Voz Latina, Legal Services for Children, Mission Neighborhood Resource Centers, Movement for Unconditional Amnesty, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, PODER, POWER, Pride at Work, SF Immigrant Legal & Education Network, SF Labor Council, SF Organizing Project, St. Peter’s Housing, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, and Young Workers United.

New board, old pain

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December 23, 2008
0

› sarah@sfbg.com

One of the first tasks awaiting the new Board of Supervisors in January 2009 is to make unprecedented cuts to the city budget as San Francisco seeks to balance a $125 million mid-year shortfall and address a projected $450 million deficit for the fiscal year that begins July 1, 2009.

"It’s hard to understand the magnitude of what lays at our doorstep," termed-out board president Aaron Peskin told the incoming supervisors when it became clear that he lacked the votes to enact a proposed package of cuts before his last day in office (see "Sharing the pain," 12/17/08).

"This is going to require a huge amount of selflessness, of sharing the pain among those who can share it the most and the least," warned Peskin, whose last day on the job is Jan. 6.

Newly sworn-in Sup. David Campos cited the magnitude of cuts as one of the reasons he voted not to move Peskin’s legislation out of a committee last week.

"I need more time to understand the proposal", said Campos, who took office in early December, only to find himself confronting "the worst crisis since the Depression," as Mayor Gavin Newsom called it during a visit to the board.

"And this way, the new board gets to weigh in," added Campos, who joins seven returning supervisors — Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, Chris Daly, Bevan Dufty, Sean Elsbernd, Sophie Maxwell, and Ross Mirkarimi — and three new supervisors: John Avalos, David Chiu, and Eric Mar.

The decision to delay budgetary cuts until 2009 also secured an extra month of grace for community service providers. Peskin and the Mayor’s Office agreed that cuts scheduled for mid-January won’t kick in until Feb. 20.

But, as Daly noted as he urged the board to kill Newsom’s million-dollar, Tenderloin-based Community Justice Court, the 409 pink slips that were recently issued predominantly to front-line city workers have not been rescinded.

"And folks will have to find many more millions to avert terrible community cuts," Daly observed. Peskin warned that the CJC could cost $2 million annually if the federal government isn’t willing to fund it next year.

Daly argued that defunding the CJC was a "no-brainer," citing the project’s lack of community support and the fact that the services it aims to divert people to — substance abuse, mental health, and homeless programs — are up for cuts.

But Daly failed to get a veto-proof super-majority after Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, who was elected to the Superior Court in November, recused himself, and Sup. Bevan Dufty, who has his eye on Room 200, voted in favor of the mayor’s project.

"I don’t see this as a new program, but one that tries to tie together what’s already in the community justice system," Dufty said.

With the bad fiscal news expected to snowball in 2009, Daly says he plans to call for hearings to examine the possibility of more cuts to upper-level city managers.

"It’s incumbent upon us to make sure there is not fat left in the city budget, especially when it comes to upper-level managers, as we are trimming the resources available to those who are more vulnerable," Daly explained.

Sharing the pain

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December 17, 2008
0

› sarah@sfbg.com

When Mayor Gavin Newsom walked across City Hall to the Board of Supervisors Chambers last week to announce that the city is facing a $576 million budget deficit, it looked as if he was putting political differences aside and genuinely inviting the board to "share the challenge" of bridging the 2008-09 budget chasm.

For years, voters and supervisors have urged Newsom to appear before the board for monthly policy discussions. And for as many years, Newsom has refused, claiming such invites were "political theater." Now that he’s finally made the trek, critics say the context makes the gesture more theatrical than substantive.

Within minutes of Newsom’s unannounced Dec. 9 visit to the board, City Hall insiders began to fear that the Newsom was only pretending to walk the unity talk: details of his $118 million in proposed mid-year solutions were not made available before the appearance, giving the two sides little to discuss and raising questions of due process.

"If the mayor was interested in real collaboration with the board, he would introduce his mid-year proposal to the board for our deliberation, just like the annual budget," Sup. Chris Daly told the Guardian. "But after we asked in three different ways, we found that he will be making over $70 million in cuts unilaterally — without the board’s approval. Now we have to figure out how to get the public a seat at the budget table."

Unlike during the normal budget process, the mayor has tremendous power to make cuts mid-year. But with details slow to emerge, the legislators weren’t the only ones left in the dark about the proposal, which includes slashing the Department of Public Health’s budget by 25 percent, cuts that DPH director Mitch Katz told the supervisors is going to require fundamentally changing how government runs.

Several City Hall workers told the Guardian how, in the days after Newsom made his budget deficit announcement, Controller Ben Rosenfield was seen running from department to department, trying to track down the program-level details.

Supervisor-elect John Avalos, who has a deep understanding of the budgetary process from his years as a legislative aide to former Budget Committee chair Daly, confirmed that the mayor’s $118 Million proposal "doesn’t tell you much."

"There is $47 million in increased revenue that has come in that offsets the shortfall, and there’s a higher-than-expected census at San Francisco General Hospital that allows us to recoup some money. But although there are all kinds of service/non-service cuts in Newsom’s proposal, we have no details to work with," Avalos told the Guardian.

Two days after his board appearance, Newsom penned an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle in which he again appeared to be holding out his hand to the board. But Avalos, a candidate for president of the board, observed that Newsom continues to protect his own pet projects, which include the 311 Call Center, the Community Justice Center, and the Small Business Assistance Center.

"The pain needs to be shared and minimized all round," Avalos warned. "The mayor needs to come forward and help us, not simply cut all the programs that the Republicans want to see cut. There is this huge backlash from folks saying, ‘Why do we spend $1 billion on our public health system? Maybe we don’t need public health.’ But our services are there for a reason."

Avalos said he worries that if we cut all these programs now, it will be very hard to get them back down the line. "When revenue is back, the focus will be on things that are important, but not on services that help the most vulnerable folks," Avalos predicted.

Within three days of Newsom’s appearance before the board, Peskin had figured out a mechanism whereby the public could weigh in on Newsom’s cuts: he introduced legislation that combines the mayor’s $118.5 million proposal with an alternative $8.5 million in cuts that Peskin has proposed.

"So, now there’s a de facto collaboration," Peskin told the Guardian. Peskin’s package of alternative cuts — which has since been pared back to $5.5 million because duplication with the mayor’s list was found — includes budget reductions in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Emergency Management Department, Fire Department, Police Department, Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, the 311 call center, and city grants to the opera, ballet, and symphony. Peskin is also proposed wage freezes that could save another $35 million.

Peskin’s counter-move allows the public to weigh in on the combined proposals. It requires department heads to publicly defend cuts to programs, services, and personnel — cuts that were developed, per Newsom’s request, behind closed doors. Or as Daly put it: "The mayor’s and the board’s proposals need to be deliberated not through a staff member to the mayor, but in full view of the public."

The board also wants to publicly discuss the layoffs, which Newsom said would total 399, a number that rose to 409 when the list was actually released. Peskin’s legislation also provides an avenue for fired workers or their representatives to publicly air discontent. A list of eliminated positions obtained by the Guardian shortly before press time shows that most of the positions were service providers making less than $70,000. Although union officials have complained that the ranks of highly paid managers has grown sharply since Newsom became mayor (visit sfbg.com for the complete list and more analysis).

SEIU’s Robert Haaland estimates that 75 percent of layoffs targeted line workers in service jobs. "As far as we can tell, the pain is all at the bottom," Haaland told the Guardian.

And while Haaland didn’t openly support Peskin’s counter-proposal — a citywide sliding scale of pay cuts in which the highest earners take a bigger hit and an across-the-board union wage freeze — he acknowledged that at least the proposal targets the powerful Police Officers Association and the Municipal Executives Association, and not just SEIU workers.

Haaland claims that under Newsom’s behind-closed-doors method, "the institutional bias of department heads tends to come into play" in making layoff decisions.

"It’s human nature. No one talks about it, and I don’t know that there’s a grand conspiracy," Haaland said, expressing his belief that it’s easier for managers to cut people they don’t work with than those around them or people at the top. "They also tend to target the union activists, the members who are a pain in the butt, and who they don’t like."

Newsom told the Chronicle in a Dec. 15 article that "labor is going to be a principal part of the solution." Tim Paulson, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council, told the Guardian that "the SFLC is listening to its affiliates to see if there are any collective strategies." But Haaland observed that the city is "contractually obligated to the unions," which may further complicate ongoing negotiations.

With Sup. Bevan Dufty advocating to restore more than $500,000 in HIV/AIDS funding cuts and Sup. Sophie Maxwell is trying to avoid cuts at the Small Business Center, newly sworn-in Sup. David Campos stressed the need for a meaningful vetting process.

"It’s important for us to have a process that sheds light on the human impacts of the proposed cuts so we have a better sense of what it means to citizens of San Francisco," Campos said at a Dec. 12 board committee hearing.

Campos also made it clear that he is not afraid to target the arts, arguing that deep-pocketed patrons can help ease their pain, even as advocates countered that attacking entertainment will further deplete the city’s coffers by potentially hurting tourism. "As much as we appreciate the need to support the arts, we’re going to have to look at other avenues some of those folks can turn to, to get the funding that is needed," Campos warned. "People who have the greatest needs don’t have those options. "

With repeated rounds of painful cuts predicted in the next six months, Peskin told a Dec. 12 Government Audits and Oversight Committee hearing that it’s critical for the board to express its priorities. "These include keeping Rec and Park facilities open, providing basic mental health services, and preserving public sector jobs," Peskin said. "It’s also important that everyone share the pain, but not necessary that everyone share the pain equally."

Outside the meeting, laid-off worker Allanda Turner described her pain and the devastation she feels at being let go in the midst of a recession. "I’m a parent. I just purchased a home. I’m feeling almost no hope at all," said Turner, who fears she will be applying for the medical services, unemployment, and food stamps that she refers clients to as part of her job with the city’s Human Services Agency.

"The mayor always says he advocates for the poor, but we are the most underpaid," she said. Meanwhile, while her colleagues claim that their department "gave Newsom what he wanted" by adding layoffs to an original list of cuts that included fewer jobs.

"These are unit clerks, employment specialists, eligibility workers, and line workers," said Sin Yee Poon, a DHS contract manager. "Eight of them are child-protection workers."

There will be one last meeting of the current Board of Supervisors in January, and both incoming and outgoing members are already specuutf8g that unless Peskin’s legislation passes with a veto-proof majority, the mayor will veto it and this period of symbolic unity will come to an abrupt end.

"We have the capacity, the ingenuity, and the spirit to solve this," Newsom told the board. "It’s going to take all of us working together. It’s in that spirit that I am here. The mid-year solution — difficult and painful as it is — it’s the easy part. The difficult part comes in the next four months."

But as legislators explore the possibility of adding to their budget tools in the future through charter amendments and special elections, one aide stressed the importance of taking an active role now.

"It’s important for the board to set the stage now for the budget discussions in the spring."

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