Sarah Phelan

Green City: Signs of asbestos

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› sarah@sfbg.com

A new front has opened up in the fight for environmental justice in the asbestos-dusted Bayview–Hunters Point community, this time featuring a Nation of Islam–affiliated nonprofit that’s using Proposition 65 — California’s "right to know" law — to force Lennar Corp. to take responsibility for what activists say is a failure to provide clear and reasonable warning that thousands of Californians are being exposed to asbestos on a daily basis in Bayview–Hunters Point.

It’s a creative use of the 21-year-old law to promote environmental justice.

On Aug. 2, the Center for Self-Improvement and Community Development, which runs the Muhammad University of Islam school next to the Parcel A work site, filed suit individually, and on behalf of the public, against Lennar Corp., Lennar Homes of California, Lennar Communities, Lennar BVHP, Lennar Associates Management, and Lennar’s subcontractor, Gordon N. Ball.

At issue is the alleged failure of Lennar and its subcontractor to notify the surrounding community of exposures to asbestos dust during the 16 months that an entire hilltop has been graded on Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard in preparation for developing a 1,500-unit condominium complex.

The suit contends that Lennar and Ball engaged in construction site activities, including grading, scraping, and excavation of materials containing asbestos as well as storage and transportation of materials off site, and continues to engage in these activities without first providing "the adjacent community and persons working at the site with toxic health hazard warnings under California’s ‘right to know’ law."

Enacted in 1986, Prop. 65 was intended to protect California citizens and the state’s drinking water sources "from hazardous chemicals and to inform [citizens] about exposure to any such chemicals." As such, it requires the state to maintain lists of hazardous chemicals and requires businesses to provide a "clear and reasonable warning" before exposing individuals to any of these listed chemicals.

But though asbestos has been listed as a carcinogen since 1987 and has been subject to Prop. 65’s warning requirements since 1988, Minister Christopher Muhammad, who heads the school, claims he first learned that asbestos was in Lennar’s Parcel A construction dust six months after grading began in 2006 —and two months after Lennar admitted to the city that its air monitoring equipment hadn’t been working.

"I did not know that the dust contained asbestos until a young worker, Christopher Carpenter, blew the whistle in October 2006, the same day he got fired from the site after asking the crew to stop digging on account of the dust being too heavy," Muhammad told the Guardian. He recalled how Carpenter visited the school, worried it hadn’t been notified after he saw children playing right next to Lennar’s site.

"The dust clouds were so thick during the summer of 2006, they were like minitornadoes on the hill, which is surrounded by water, so the wind swirls upwards," Muhammad said. He noted that the baseball courts, classroom windows, and jungle gym are 10 feet from a chain link fence that is the only thing separating Lennar’s site from the school, and noted that a Boys and Girls Club, a public housing project, and many residences lie in close proximity to Parcel A, whose dust was seen drifting across the entire neighborhood.

There’s a strong case here: there’s no doubt that the construction project was generating asbestos dust — and still may be. The suit seeks to prohibit Lennar and Ball from engaging in construction activities or any other work at the site "without first providing clear and reasonable warnings to each exposed person residing, working, or visiting the adjacent community and to workers at the site regarding asbestos exposures."

Enforcing Prop. 65 is the responsibility of the state attorney general, the local district attorney, or the city attorney, but as attorney Andrew Packard told us, the law also allows private entities to sue.

Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, said the office is "keeping an eye on the situation, including this private effort, and would take it very seriously if a determination is made that a case of action exists in favor of the city."

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Redevelopment’s new face

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› sarah@sfbg.com

City Hall’s cavernous marble corridors echoed Aug. 14 with the footsteps of a band of sharply dressed African Americans, many of them ministers and all of them come to voice support for Fred Blackwell’s appointment as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

Blackwell, who has a master’s degree in city planning from UC Berkeley and has been working for the Mayor’s Office of Community Development since 2005, most recently as director, won’t be the first African American to occupy the agency’s top post.

But Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to nominate Blackwell was seen by many as a hopeful sign that the agency might proactively address problems that have torn apart the Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point community in the past year and continue to dog the agency in the Western Addition.

These concerns include the suspicion that Newsom’s plan to fold Candlestick Point into the already controversial Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project is less about wooing the 49ers to stay and more about jumping into bed with Lennar Corp., a deep-pocketed and politically connected development company (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07).

The deal gives Lennar the right to develop 6,500 new housing units and take over the cleanup of Hunters Point Shipyard — a move mayoral candidate Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai described as "the dirty transfer of the shipyard" (see "And They’re Off," 8/15/07).

A growing body of Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point residents has asked the city to temporarily shut down construction at the shipyard’s Parcel A because of concerns about the toxic dust being kicked up (see "Dust Devils," 8/1/07).

And then there’s lingering ill will from the 1960s, when redevelopment caused the massive displacement of African Americans from the Western Addition.

So will Blackwell be able to solve the agency’s deep-rooted problems? Newsom described Blackwell as "an outstanding choice" when nominating him Aug. 10, while agency commission president Rich Peterson called Blackwell "smart, of high integrity, well known by community leaders, and familiar with the unique opportunities as well as important lessons learned of redevelopment in the city."

But while commissioner Francee Covington declared that "a new day is dawning at the agency" shortly before the commission voted 7–<\d>0 to appoint Blackwell, the African American community still has its concerns.

Minister Christopher Muhammad, who has led the voicing of concerns about the Parcel A dust, was proud to see an African American in a position of leadership. "But we are still going to hold your feet to the fire," he said. "Redevelopment is not just about the redevelopment of physical structures but [also] about the redevelopment of human beings."

Noting that Blackwell is a 1991 graduate of Morehouse College, Rev. Amos Brown said, "I find no fault in this man, and you will not find any either in terms of fitness for this office," while local resident Randall Evans voiced his belief that "the only folks gonna take care of black people’s business are black folks."

Activist-journalist Ace Washington observed that Blackwell is "coming into a very hot seat. He needs some ice cubes to sit down. Only time will tell if he stands by his convictions. It doesn’t matter if the director is black, Latino, Asian, or white. All of us here are saying, ‘Ah, a breath of fresh air.’<\!s>"

Rev. Arnold Townsend said, "We trust the resources are there to help community — and not to tell the community what to do. Because until that dynamic changes, it won’t matter who is executive director."

Blackwell conceded that he had misgivings about heading an agency founded in 1948 to remove blight, a mission that many say has been tainted by racism since its inception. "I admit I was not leaping and jumping when my name first surfaced, but I look forward to working with you all," Blackwell told the commission.

Blackwell later told the Guardian he hopes "to foster a sense of equity and opportunity and a broader vision of community development."

"The legacy of redevelopment and urban renewal is not a good one," he said. "The residue is still there, but trust is only built through action."

Describing the Western Addition and Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point as "two bookends in terms of redevelopment," Blackwell said he hopes "to close out the agency’s relationship with the Western Addition and make sure responsibility is transferred seamlessly to the appropriate agencies."

As for Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point, "we should take stock of what we should and should not do, get on the right track, and create opportunities for people who live there," he said.

But Sumchai wants to put the agency under the control of the Board of Supervisors: "You could appoint Jesus of Nazareth and still have problems as long as the agency is locked into its current structure."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi says putting an African American at the head of the Redevelopment Agency "makes a lot of sense, considering the egregious and negative impact the agency has had on the African American community…. But no matter how well-liked Fred Blackwell is, that does not compensate for the deficiencies of the Redevelopment Agency’s aims and competence."<\!s>*

Dust storm continues

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The dust is still settling after a contentious Board of Supervisors hearing July 31 about public health problems allegedly related to the 1,500-unit condo complex that Lennar Corp. is building on Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard. Department of Public Health officials succeeded in convincing a narrow board majority not to urge a temporary halt to the project but failed to reassure hundreds of mostly African American residents of Bayview–Hunters Point that their health has not been negatively impacted by Lennar’s inability to properly monitor naturally occurring asbestos and control dust at the hilltop site.

At the hearing, minister Christopher Muhammad of the Muhammad University of Islam, which lies adjacent to Parcel A, urged a shutdown and accused the city of "environmental racism," while Dr. Arelious Walker of the True Hope Church of God in Christ and Rev. J. Edgar Boyd of Bethel AME argued that the project is safe and beneficial to the community and that, in Walker’s words, there is "no evidence to warrant a shutdown." Many project supporters were brought in by Lennar on buses. Some observers called the clash "a holy war in the Bayview."

After the board voted 5–6 against a shutdown, there were angry allegations that some pastors had not publicly disclosed their financial interest in seeing the construction project continue. During the hearings, neither Walker nor Boyd disclosed that they had a contract with Lennar to build 200 homes on Parcel A. Reached by phone, Walker denied any self-interest in recommending that Lennar’s construction project continue. "My history disproves that," Walker told the Guardian. "If anyone unearths any evidence of harm, I’d back off my support."

The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is doing an assessment based on a July 17 request by the Department of Public Health. In a public health assessment of Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado County, where naturally occurring asbestos was exposed during construction of a playing field, the federal agency found that athletes, coaches, and maintenance workers were "at higher risk [of exposure to asbestos] than previously thought," according to spokesperson Susan Muza. But while the agency recommended soil removal and landscaping, Muza told us it did not recommend the school be relocated or closed.

Meanwhile, Walker also rejects the notion that Bayview–Hunters Point is being torn apart by competing religious factions. "Minister Muhammad’s group has helped prove that there is a serious problem," Walker said. "I applaud him for that. We just disagree about the dust, but that’s not going to bring about a breach. I refuse to let there be a holy war."

Walker said his motive is more African American homeownership. But he learned how tough that is when he developed 20 town houses near Candlestick Point. "We wanted a 50 percent African American homeownership rate, but only two families ended up qualifying," Walker said, blaming "bad credit."

That raises questions about the likelihood that Bayview–Hunters Point’s predominantly African American and low-income community will be able to afford Lennar’s condos, with prices ranging from $300,000 for units required to be "affordable" (about 30 percent of the units) to $700,000 for market-rate units. (Sarah Phelan)

Dust devils

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› sarah@sfbg.com

A year has passed since Lennar Corp. officials admitted that subcontractor CH2M Hill failed to install batteries in dust-monitoring equipment at Parcel A, a construction site in Hunters Point Shipyard where an asbestos-laden hilltop was graded to build 1,600 condominiums (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07).

The admission sparked a steadily growing political firestorm in Bayview–Hunters Point, further fueled by evidence that Gordon Ball, another Lennar subcontractor, for six months failed to adequately water the site to control dust and by a racially charged lawsuit in which three African American employees of Lennar allege they were subjected to discrimination and retaliation after they refused to remain silent about the dust issue. The lawsuit, set for a case management hearing Aug. 17, also claims that Ball committed fraud involving the Redevelopment Agency’s minority-hiring requirements.

Bayview–Hunters Point residents angry about the situation have found an ally in Sup. Chris Daly, who has called for a halt to construction at the site until an independent health assessment is conducted to the satisfaction of the community, including the Muhammad University of Islam School, which is adjacent to the Parcel A site and has been exposed to dust. The Board of Supervisors was scheduled to consider Daly’s resolution Jul. 31, after the Guardian‘s press time.

"This issue is of such a high level of importance," Daly told us. "There’s now a mandate for progressives in San Francisco to talk about environmental justice and to take action."

Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes the shipyard, told us that she understands the concerns of Daly and the community. "But when you get down it … the dust is inconvenient, but it is not harmful in the long term," she said.

Maxwell believes the city’s Department of Public Health should have done more outreach and updates, "but it has brought the situation under control." That sentiment was echoed by the city’s environmental health director, Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, who told us, "This is the first time we have implemented dust control, and this is an industry that had never been regulated. And in the end, things got better. We did our job in pushing a regulated community that grudgingly complied with our regulations."

In June, after residents complained that the dust was causing nosebleeds, headaches, and asthma, the DPH released a fact sheet that stated, "You may have heard there are reasons to worry about your health because of the construction dust generated by the redevelopment of Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard. That is not true."

A July 5 informational DPH memo claims that when workers tried to do dust training and outreach at the end of June, their efforts "were significantly hindered by representatives of the Muhammad University of Islam," who allegedly disrupted training sessions, followed DPH workers, and told residents not to listen to the DPH workers.

On July 9, DPH director Mitch Katz testified at a hearing of the supervisors’ Land Use Committee that the city had imposed the highest standards possible to control dust. Katz also claimed that exposure to the dust was not toxic and that there is no proof that health problems were caused by the dust.

But at the same hearing, Nation of Islam minister Christopher Muhammad demanded testing "by people the community can trust," and he accused the city of "environmental racism." Noting that asbestos-related diseases often don’t manifest themselves for at least 20 years, Muhammad claimed, "The problem that we’re seeing in Bayview–Hunters Point is dust related."

After the DPH abandoned plans to do door-to-door outreach in favor of a series of health fairs, a coalition of activists calling itself POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), some wearing masks and hazmat suits, closed down a July 17 homeownership seminar at Lennar’s shipyard trailer.

"Some folks did a picket outside, while inside, folks who own homes or live in public housing in the area were asking a lot of questions," POWER’s Alicia Schwartz told us. "We are for development that prioritizes the needs of low-income communities of color who have long been absent from the decision-making process, not development that puts the health and safety of families and the elderly at risk."

Two days later Marcia Rosen resigned as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. SFRA board member London Breed told us that the resignation was "a long time coming" and said she wished Rosen had taken a stronger stand on Lennar and Ball in the winter of 2006.

Breed says the agency "will always be a bad word to African Americans because of what happened in the Western Addition…. But we have a great opportunity in Bayview–Hunters Point to make it into something wonderful for the community."

Maxwell, whose grandson attended the Muhammad school’s Third Street campus, wonders why the minister refuses to move his students back to Third Street. "Lennar understands that this has become a PR nightmare and they are going to have to get contractors who are supportive of and understand the rules and regulations," said Maxwell, who is about to introduce legislation that she hopes will better control construction dust citywide.

Meanwhile, Dr. Arelious Walker of the True Hope Church of God in Christ told us that he and a group of like-minded pastors have formed the African American Revitalization Consortium, "a highly vocal and visible group in strong opposition to the shutting down of the shipyard without scientific proof."

"We support 100 percent the notion that the dust from Parcel A does not cause any long-term health risks. The project must continue because of its economic impacts. One little group does not speak for us all," said Walker, who met with Mayor Gavin Newsom, Maxwell, and Katz on July 23.

Acknowledging that the outcry over Parcel A has raised awareness of the dust issue, Walker said, "For years in the urban community, the environment was not the issue, but now we’ve woken up." Walker and his fellow ministers rallied about 200 people at City Hall on July 24 to express support for Lennar’s development and confidence in city officials.

Yet Daly said that faith may be misplaced: "It’s going to be a struggle to deal with the construction-related impacts of Lennar’s development at the shipyard, but the issue is much bigger, and it points to the need for an alliance between progressives, the African American community, and the southeast neighborhoods." *

Of people and plastics

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› sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us begins with a funny but humbling exploration of what would happen to New York City if humans were gone, wiped out by a virus or a wizard who perfected a way to sterilize our sperm. "Or say that Jesus, or space aliens rapture us away, either to our heavenly glory, or to a zoo somewhere across the galaxy," Wiseman writes, launching into a delicious deconstruction of a great world city.

Without people to unblock the sewers or run the power stations, it wouldn’t take long, Weisman predicts, before the city flooded, streets cratered, weeds sprang up, pipes burst, and fires broke out.

"Collectively, New York’s architecture isn’t as combustible as, say, San Francisco’s incendiary row of clapboard Victorians," Weisman notes as he describes how, with no firefighters to answer the calls, fires triggered by lightning would engulf the city.

Over the following centuries, corrosion would periodically set off "time bombs left in petroleum tanks, chemical and power plants, and hundreds of dry cleaners," while outdoors a great return to wildness would occur, repopuutf8g the city with maturing forests, coyotes, wolves, "and a wily population of feral house cats."

Tracing the Big Apple’s demise through to the next ice age, Weisman concludes that "after the ice recedes, buried in geologic layers below will be an unnatural concentration of reddish metal, which briefly had assumed the form of wiring and plumbing."

Reached by phone, Weisman says he came up with his World Without Us fantasy after reading and writing about the environment for two decades, including stints covering Chernobyl and the melting of the Artic permafrost.

"I saw all this stuff and began to say, ‘Oh man, this hopeless,’ but then I stepped back and saw that there are places that are still untouched and beautiful and that even in Chernobyl, voles were throwing off bigger litters," he says.

Weisman’s book resulted from his struggle to find a way "to get people to read about environmental issues without saying, ‘Oh, forget it,’ and throwing away their newspapers." The author says his fantasy is intended to help people take a long view of our current challenges and begin to understand, for example, the profoundly serious impact of, say, plastic on our world.

He focuses on "the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," or the North Pacific subtropical gyre, as it’s officially known. It’s in this swirling sink, Weisman writes, that "nearly everything that blows into the water from half the Pacific Rim eventually ends up, spiraling slowly towards a widening horror of industrial excretion."

"They say it’s an enormous sump, and there are others on the planet where all the plastic ends up," Weisman says, noting that discarded plastic accounts for only 20 percent of the material in landfills, with the rest consisting mostly of construction debris and paper products. But unlike the Rocky Mountains, which are slowly, almost imperceptibly eroding and will end up in the ocean, plastic gets blown into the sea much faster.

"It’s only been around since World War II, but already it’s everywhere," Wiseman says of plastic, which has the featherweight ability, once broken into tiny particles, to ride global sea currents.

Weisman’s account should leave San Francisco proud to be the first US city to ban plastic bags, since these limp suckers apparently feature heavily in the oceanic sumps. But with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch measuring 10 million square miles in area (nearly the size of Africa) as of 2005 and six other tropical oceanic gyres swirling with ugly plastic debris — not to mention all the other environmental problems humans have caused — is it too late to heal our world?

Specuutf8g that microbes will eventually evolve to eat all our plastics — something that could take 100,000 years to occur — Weisman suggests a healing path that doesn’t require a world without us. "Green technology won’t be enough on its own," he notes. "The answer lies in lowering the number of humans on the planet. I don’t mean shoot ourselves, but that we don’t replace ourselves at same rate."

There are 6.6 billion people on the planet, and 9 billion are predicted by 2050. Weisman says that by restricting reproduction to one child per couple, "our population could shrink to 1.6 billion by 2100, and the world will be a better place." And in the meantime, don’t forget the reusable bags on your next trip to the grocery store.*

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Contemputf8g Wolf

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Months after local videographer and blogger Josh Wolf was released from federal prison — where his seven-month stay was the longest in history for an American journalist for refusing to turn over unpublished materials to criminal prosecutors — the San Francisco Police Commission finally has decided to analyze the incident. That inquiry comes just as Wolf embarks on a campaign for mayor, which he hopes will create a dialogue about the lack of police accountability and the overzealous federal intrusions that marked his story.

Wolf, 24, told the Guardian that he’s still baffled by what transpired after he filmed the July 8, 2005, anti-G8 protest, which involved a heavy anarchist turnout, "got rowdier than local officials would have liked," and left a San Francisco police officer with a fractured skull — an incident that Wolf calls "unfortunate" but of which he claims to have absolutely no knowledge

"I’ve read the evidence that was presented in my case, but to this day no one has pointed out anything that constitutes terrorism," Wolf said.

The day after the protest, Wolf was contacted at his home by members of the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, along with two San Francisco Police Department officers. The four agents who showed up Wolf’s door, one of them dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, demanded that he hand over all his video outtakes after local and national TV stations aired edited footage that Wolf posted on his blog. The aired film included scenes of anarchists setting off firecrackers, turning over newspaper racks, and spray-painting a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. office. It also showed an SFPD officer holding local resident Gabe Meyers in a choke hold while another agent waved his weapon at the crowd and shouted, "Leave or you’re going to get blasted. I’m a fed, motherfucker."

"If any time the SFPD decides it doesn’t want to deal with some local issue, does it have the autonomy to contact the feds, and if so, doesn’t that jeopardize all the laws that the voters of San Francisco have passed?" Wolf asked July 11 as the Police Commission discussed a resolution supporting the First Amendment rights of the "new media," which is how Web-based disseminators of news, such as Wolf, are being described.

Earlier this year, police commissioner David Campos tried to pass a resolution in support of the then-jailed Wolf, but the proposal got no traction until Theresa Sparks was elected as president in May. By then Wolf had been free from jail for a month, leading Campos and Sparks to shift their focus toward investigating exactly why Wolf’s case got federalized in the first place as well as the implications for other groups that are protected locally but at risk federally.

As Campos told the commission, "A lot of people in San Francisco have been talking about how we as a department interact with the feds, to the extent that it has an impact on medical cannabis providers and immigrants and on First Amendment rights, as in the case of Josh Wolf."

Under state law, reporters’ sources and their work products are protected. A recent case involving Apple suggests that the law also extends to bloggers and independent reporters. But under federal law, reporters have no such protections, which is why former New York Times journalist Judith Miller was jailed in the Valerie Plame–CIA investigation and San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada faced potential jail time in the BALCO affair, as did freelancer Sara Olsen in the court-martial of Army Lt. Ehren Watada.

But while these journalists refused to comply with subpoenas that were clearly related to federal matters, there was no such obvious connection in Wolf’s case. An investigation into the assault on SFPD officer Peter Shields normally would have been undertaken by local police and District Attorney Kamala Harris. Police records show that SFPD inspector Lea Militello requested "assistance from the FBI/JTTF regarding investigation of a serious assault against a San Francisco police officer." Federal investigators justified their involvement by maintaining that there had been an attempted arson on an SFPD squad car purchased in part with federal funds, even though SFPD records indicate only that the car’s rear tail light was broken.

"There was nothing incriminating on my tape," Wolf told the Police Commission, recalling how he offered to prove his statement by letting the federal judge view it in his private chambers, an offer the judge refused. "But because I had no federal protections, I had to decide whether to engage in a McCarthyesque witch hunt," Wolf added; he long had suspected that the feds wanted to profile anarchists about whom he has intimate knowledge.

Campos and Sparks hope that last week’s Police Commission discussion will be the first in a series about the protocols and procedures that the SFPD follows in deciding whether to refer matters to federal authorities. Both stress that asking for such a study does not mean they do not care that an SFPD officer was hurt. As Sparks told us, "At this point we don’t know what the deliberations behind everything that night were or how many people were deployed. For us to comment on a police officer being injured is inappropriate unless we have all the information. And all we’re hearing is anecdotal stuff. Our job is not to take sides but to figure out what the policies were, are, and what they should be."

Police Chief Heather Fong has agreed to report to the Police Commission in August on policies and procedures related to the SFPD’s General Orders, the city’s ordinances on immigration and medical marijuana, and protection of journalists’ rights. Sparks predicts that the report will tell the commission "what the SFPD’s policies do, how that compares to the Board of Supervisors’ resolutions, and whether we need to rewrite them or write new rules for the police."

Commissioner Campos told us he hopes the report will clarify whether the police have an obligation to report to the feds if an investigation involves damage to property bought with federal funding. "If it’s the case that we are obligated, then we need a discussion. Do we want to accept funds if doing so ties our hands and forces us to do something that San Francisco doesn’t want to do? For instance, if we accept funding, then does that mean we have to cooperate with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]? If so, then a lot of us, myself included, would be up in arms and would say, ‘Let’s not.’ To the extent that it comes down to money, I’d hope that we’d make the choice that we’d rather not take the money than get in bed with the federal government."

Wolf, who was not convicted of any crime but served 226 days for being in contempt of a grand jury subpoena, was released April 3 after he agreed to post all his unedited footage online — an action the feds claimed as evidence that he had submitted to their demands. But Wolf pointed out that he agreed to do so only after the feds promised that he would not have to testify about anyone whose actions or words he had captured on tape. He also pointed out that he released the tapes to everyone, not just the federal government.

Since being released Wolf has announced his intention to run for mayor of San Francisco this fall, saying he was inspired by the recent Progressive Convention called by Sup. Chris Daly "in which they had a great platform but no declared candidate."

Wolf’s candidacy pits him against Mayor Gavin Newsom, who expressed neither support for Wolf nor criticism of his detention. That stance is in contrast with that of Harris, who is also running for reelection this fall and publicly criticized the US Attorney’s Office in March, a month before Wolf was released. In August 2006, Newsom returned unsigned the resolution of support for Wolf’s plight that was sponsored by Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi, Tom Ammiano, and Daly. The resolution, which passed on a 9–1 vote, with Sup. Sean Elsbernd voting no and Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier absent, declared that the city "resisted the federal government’s intervention in the City and County of San Francisco’s investigation of the July 8th, 2005 G-8 protest; expressed support for the California Shield Law; and urged Congress to pass Senate Bill 2831, the Free Flow of Information Act."

Asked about Newsom’s position on Wolf and related matters, spokesperson Nathan Ballard reminded the Guardian that the mayor authorized a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the assault on Shields. "We take these attacks seriously and will take the appropriate actions necessary to ensure that the person or persons responsible are prosecuted," the mayor said shortly after the assault. As for Wolf, Ballard said by e-mail, "I am not aware of any public statement [by] the Mayor on the case of Josh Wolf. The Mayor is generally supportive of the concept of a better shield law, but he has not taken a position on this particular bill at the present time."

As it happens, Wolf, who has made numerous media appearances since his release, including on The Colbert Report, could find himself in the unusual position of having more name recognition than any of Newsom’s other challengers. And with Congress currently considering a federal shield law, the cause for which Wolf went to jail remains in the news. As media activist Rick Knee put it, pointing to the "Free Josh Wolf" button that he continues to wear on the lapel of his tweed jacket, "Josh may be out, but the issue is still with us." *

Tweeking the tidelands

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› sarah@sfbg.com

With the furor over her erratic driving incident still lingering and a primary challenge from Assemblymember Mark Leno starting to get nasty, state senator Carole Migden is now wading into another potentially pungent political pool.

This time around, the battle involves the state’s laws governing coastal land use, the Port of San Francisco’s revenue needs, and the competing interests of folks who live along, work near, or simply like to relax and recreate along the city’s bayside waterfront.

Migden’s Senate Bill 815 would make three major changes to the ancient and arcane laws that govern the use of the state’s tidelands. It would allow the port to rent out 11 seawall-protected properties, currently used for surface parking lots, for development over 75 years, after which they would return to the public trust.

It would also permit the port to sell off "paper streets" — lots that serve as view corridors, public rights-of-way, and connections between the city and its waterfront, including portions of Texas, Custer, Ingalls, and Davidson streets developed with warehouses, as well as the recently closed Hunters Point Power Plant.

Last, Migden’s bill would allow the transfer of the 36-acre, federally owned Jobs Corps parcel on Treasure Island to local control as part of an exchange of public trust and nontrust lands on Treasure and Yerba Buena islands.

Port special project manager Brad Benson told the Guardian that the local agency worked with the California State Lands Commission for two years on ways to help increase the port’s revenue-generating capabilities, and this bill was the result.

"We cc’d the neighborhood organizations on the amendments that we sent to Migden’s office on June 12, and we invited further discussion," Benson said of the proposal, which is intended to help cover the port’s estimated $1.4 billion cost for seismic retrofits and restorations, hazardous-material remediation, storm-water management, and improved waterfront access by relaxing the land-use restriction of the 1969 Burton Act.

The Burton Act gave the port control of San Francisco’s waterfront from Fisherman’s Wharf to Candlestick Point, including 39 historic finger piers between Fisherman’s Wharf and China Basin. But it also limited the port to leasing seawall lots for street purposes such as surface parking while giving it the financial responsibility of maintaining and restoring the historical waterfront.

Today just about everybody agrees that surface parking is a horrible use of the seawall lots — with the possible exception of the Giants, who want to retain 2,000 spaces on the 14-acre lot they lease next to Mission Creek. But in recent weeks disagreement has broken out over last-minute amendments that were added to Migden’s bill June 20 to impose height limits on four seawall lots in the Northeastern Waterfront Historic District and remove a fifth lot entirely.

Those amendments were added following input from neighborhood groups like the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association, and the Friends of the Golden Gate, a 1,400-member nonprofit whose stated goal is "to preserve open recreational space for the citizens of San Francisco."

In a June 20 letter to Migden, Telegraph Hill Dwellers president Vedica Puri argued for height limits on the basis of a "visual and historic connection between the waterfront and Telegraph Hill" created by "higher structures closer to the base of Telegraph Hill and lower buildings near the Embarcadero." Noting that three of the disputed lots are currently zoned for heights of 40 feet, with the fourth lot, closer to Telegraph Hill, zoned for 65 feet, Puri argued for respecting local height limits in place as of January.

Meanwhile, the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association, the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, and the Friends of the Golden Gate asked that lot 351, which abuts the Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club, be excluded from the deal.

"There is an ongoing struggle in the Barbary Coast neighborhood over an outsize condominium project usually known as the 8 Washington Project," Jonathan Middlebrook of the association’s Waterfront Action Group warned.

Friends of the Golden Gate chair Lee Radner, in a June 29 letter to Loni Hancock, chair of the Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee, argued for keeping lot 351 under the public trust because it "abuts the open recreational space, along the Embarcadero, Washington, and Drumm streets."

"Lot 351, if removed from the public trust," Radner wrote, "will give a developer the option to build high-rise, exclusive, and costly condominiums that would spill over into the recreational space and change the open view corridors to Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower forever, limit the light and views of many neighbors, and impact the traffic on an already congested Embarcadero."

But two local planning and land-use groups argue that Migden’s amended legislation would wrest control of height restrictions from the local planning process and benefit a well-heeled few at the expense of everyone else.

Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, said he believes height limits and urban design should be decided at the local level. "The problem with stipuutf8g a 40-foot height limit is that you end up getting squashed retail space, creating a pokey, unpleasant atmosphere," said Radulovich, who’d rather see the lots taken out of the bill than included with those provisions. "To my mind the question is: how do builders create a great street? And what building controls help achieve that goal? We wanted to make these lots more walkable, bikeable, and accessible to contribute to the overall public good with the maximum opportunity for local control. The latest amendments tip the balance towards state interference, and that’s inappropriate."

Tim Colen of the Housing Action Coalition accuses the neighborhood associations of "not wanting any height increases or other uses to the extent that it might threaten their view." Colen said developer Simon Snellgrove of Pacific Waterfront Partners is interested in lot 351, which lies across from the Ferry Building, to create high-end condos, mixed-use residential units, and 34 below-market-rate units.

He acknowledges that the Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club would lose three tennis courts under the legislation. "But this is a chance for 34 families to get housing and be able to stay in San Francisco," Colen said. "The Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club is a really sweet facility, but it ain’t public recreation. Migden’s bill benefits some very well-heeled people when the interests of many are at stake."

Migden’s bill, which cleared the Senate but must return for final approval because of the amendments, is set to work its way through the Assembly by August. Benson said continued negotiations would be a good thing. "We appreciate Senator Migden’s work, but we believe height limits are a locals-only matter to be decided by the Board of Supervisors and the mayor."

But the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association’s Diana Taylor said her group "spent hours getting the community informed, telling the port what we wanted, until eventually we came up with a bottom line, what our compromises were…. That’s where senator Carole Migden developed amendments, and this was the first time that we came to a coordinated agreement. But now we find out that the port isn’t happy with some of the amendments. What we’d like to see is a more clear-cut strategy to bring the port and the communities together. We’re adversaries right now, but we shouldn’t be."

With the port set to have a public discussion July 31 about lot 337 (the Giants’ parking lot next to Mission Creek), Jennifer Clary of San Francisco Tomorrow notes that Mission Creek is home to 60 species of birds. As she said, "Isn’t habitat preservation and restoration part of urban development? Is it really a choice between people and birds? Is that the decision?"<\!s>*

Citizen planning

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› sarah@sfbg.com

The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan has become a high-stakes battleground involving anxious developers stalled by a temporary building moratorium, progressives who want more affordable housing, concerns about dwindling light-industrial spaces and an exodus of African American residents, environmental justice, and a list of other issues that are central to this sprawling section of the city.

But the folks in the neighborhood known as Western SoMa are just happy that they’re no longer a part of that mess. Instead, they’re excitedly experimenting with a new approach to planning using an innovative and largely untested grassroots model.

Five years ago, when the city Planning Department first announced its intention to rezone the Eastern Neighborhoods, a group of disenchanted SoMa residents decided that they wanted to secede from that process and develop an independent, more comprehensive, community-based plan.

"A lot of us were offended by the Planning Department’s top-down, autocratic process," Jim Meko, who later became chair of the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force, told the Guardian. "It was a bad process for everybody, but it was particularly bad for SoMa because the neighborhood had already been rezoned in the 1990s."

Meko survived three major demographic shifts within three decades: the AIDS epidemic that decimated SoMa’s gay community, the live-work loft zoning loopholes that gutted the artistic community, and the dot-com crash that displaced many techies. He feared that the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan would impose a "one-size-fits-all mode that treated all of SoMa like postindustrial wasteland."

So Meko set his sights on pressuring the Planning Commission to split his neighborhood from the rest of the Eastern Neighborhoods, which include the Mission District, Eastern SoMa, Showplace Square, Potrero Hill, and the Central Waterfront. Western SoMa is bordered by Mission and Bryant, 13th and Fourth streets, and Harrison and Townsend.

That dream became a reality in February 2004, and that November the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force formed, with a stated objective to "recommend zoning changes that will preserve the heart and soul of their neighborhood, while planning for the realities of 21st-century growth."

Since beginning its work in 2005, the 22-member task force has met as often as five times a month and has created a values statement; a set of planning principles; committees focusing on business and land use, transportation, and arts and entertainment; and a committee that integrates a variety of issues.

Its June 28 town hall meeting was the first time the task force threw the doors open to the community at large, although the occasion happened to come on the heels of a high-profile budget battle between Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Chris Daly, whose district includes SoMa and who helped set up the task force.

Within five minutes of Meko’s kicking off the meeting, a small but vocal group of attendees began to heckle him midspeech. Perhaps they were there to confront Daly, who had been slated to attend but was out of town. Whatever the reason, while accusing Meko of "having an agenda" and "using the bully pulpit" to present his own views, this faction was anxious to know how many task force members are property owners and which particular group of them would be dealing with crime, the fight against which Newsom has made a top budget priority.

For one wobbly, tension-filled moment, it felt as if this first crack at a citizen planning forum might crumble. But then another participant saved the day by requesting a simple but basic meeting ground rule: no personal attacks.

From that moment, the mood in the room lightened. Pretty soon the rest of the 150 residents who had gathered in the multipurpose room of Bessie Carmichael School on Seventh Street to share their thoughts on Western SoMa were talking about what they liked and what could improve. Even the hecklers quieted down and seemed to meld into the discussion.

As Planning Commissioner Christina Olague put it at the meeting, "This is possibly one of the most exciting things going on in planning. No one understands the heart and soul of a neighborhood like the people who live there. We hope this is a model other neighborhoods will adopt, because a neighborhood plan without the involvement of neighbors who live and breath a community is chaos — just a bunch of buildings zoned in a language no one can read or feel."

But while residents were happy to create lists of neighborhood needs — more parks, bike lanes, affordable housing, child care facilities, and trees; wider sidewalks; and fewer homeless people — they were less keen on the idea of increasing building heights. One proposed means of financing improvements would be to increase allowable heights from 40 to 65 feet in some places.

Some locals complained about partygoers who urinate in the streets and play music loudly in cars instead of going home when the clubs close. But a youthful resident politely pointed out that "it may not be possible to stop young people from being young."

In the face of requests from senior citizens for more dinner theater and fewer nightclubs in SoMa, task force member and nightclub owner Terrance Allen observed that it’s probably only possible to "nudge existing conditions."

Recalling the battle that broke out between residents and partygoers after city planners decided to put affordable housing next to the wildly popular nightclub 1015 Folsom, Allen said, "You don’t want to start a war by putting subsidized housing next to the city’s biggest nightclub." Or as Meko put it, "We don’t want to set up conflicts by putting family housing across from the Stud."

By evening’s end, the consensus was that the meeting was a success. "We have much more in common than we have apart. That’s the whole key," said Marc Salomon, who sits on the task force’s transportation committee. As Meko told the Guardian the next day, "Wasn’t it a fantastic experience? It was the closest thing to a cocktail party without a bartender."

Meko said the task force is eager to complete its work and is shooting for having a draft plan ready by the next town hall meeting, on Oct. 24.

"But we need to do more community outreach," he added, noting that there weren’t many Filipinos at the first meeting even though they have a large presence in Western SoMa. "We’re looking at what SoMa could be like in 20 years. The other Eastern Neighborhoods are watching, and they are envious." *

Budget blowback

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› sarah@sfbg.com

People’s Budget Coalition member Esther Morales says she’s angry that the media obsessed over Sup. Chris Daly’s June 19 comments about whether Mayor Gavin Newsom has honestly addressed allegations that he’s used cocaine yet ignored hours of testimony that hundreds of San Franciscans gave at the very same meeting, a state-mandated hearing on the impact of Newsom’s proposed spending cuts on the city’s neediest populations, including those with drug and alcohol problems.

"There’s been so much press about that hearing, but it’s all been about what’s happening between Sup. Chris Daly and the mayor," Morales said, accurately observing that there has been no coverage by the mainstream media of the addicts who waited for hours that night but only got to talk for two minutes each about how they would have died had it not been for the substance abuse programs that Newsom plans to cut.

Nor has much been written about the folks who pleaded for Buster’s Place, the city’s only all-night homeless shelter, which was to close at the end of June unless the Board of Supervisors saved it from Newsom’s $1.6 million cut. Nor has much mention been made of the organizers from the city’s four single-room occupancy hotel collaboratives that showed up at City Hall a few days earlier to decry Newsom’s proposed $233,000 cut in their combined budgets.

As David Ho of the Chinatown Community Development Center told the Guardian, "These are programs for the poor and for public health, and they are always on the chopping block. The mayor talks about the need to preserve working-class families in the city, and here we are being left out of the budget."

Muna Landers of the Coalition on Homelessness said SRO hotel rooms were originally meant to be single dwellings, but now more than 450 families — 85 percent of whom are immigrants — live in such rooms without bathrooms or kitchens. "When one family moves out, three families move in," Landers said.

Meanwhile, in light of Newsom’s proposal to restore only 50 percent of a $9 million federal cut in San Francisco’s HIV/AIDS programs, San Francisco AIDS Housing Alliance director Brian Basinger accused the mayor of "playing bullshit games."

As Morales told us this week, "What’s really behind these fights between Chris and the mayor is the fact that Chris spearheaded the board’s $28 million affordable-housing supplement…. Without Daly’s footwork the $28 million supplemental would not have passed by an 8–3 majority, and the mayor only refused to sign it because it was Chris’s measure."

Morales works with 60 community-based groups as the organizer of the Family Budget Committee, one of seven committees of the People’s Budget Coalition, which unveiled its annual report June 21 on the steps of City Hall. The group values services for those struggling to get by.

"But this mayor’s budget is a law-and-order, streets-and-potholes, increasingly right-wing conservative budget that is not reflective of what San Francisco is about, and it will drive even more families out of town," Morales told us.

Months ago the Family Budget Committee met with the mayor’s staff to ask for a $30 million package of services, part of the People’s Budget Coalition’s $78 million request from the mayor’s record $6.1 billion budget.

"The mayor’s staff talked to us about how dismal the budget year looked, how the firefighters’, the police[‘s], and the nurses’ contracts are up for negotiations, and so they didn’t know how much money they would end up with," Morales recalled.

So the Family Budget Committee whittled down its needs, first to $20 million, then $10 million, and sent those priorities to the Mayor’s Office for consideration. Ultimately, it said, the mayor found just $1.5 million for its priorities, so it turned its attention to the Board of Supervisors.

Since board president Aaron Peskin removed Daly as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee on June 15 and took the reins himself, the body has restored $4 million in HIV/AIDS funding, and much more is on the way. Peskin told us that he intends to significantly change the mayor’s budget, promising more so-called add backs than the board has ever approved.

"It’s all about priorities," Peskin told us. He said Daly "never intended to actually cut" any of the mayor’s top-priority projects when he introduced his motion to slash $37 million from Newsom’s funding plans. It was simply a negotiating tactic that "backfired majorly" when the targeted constituencies rallied against Daly.

Yet board progressives haven’t been derailed by Daly’s actions, as many pundits predicted. At the same meeting at which Daly mentioned cocaine while making a point about substance abuse program cuts, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi led a challenge of Newsom’s proposed San Francisco Police Department contract on the grounds that it would grant cops a 25 percent pay increase but give the city little in return. And there are still eight supervisors who supported Daly’s affordable-housing plan.

Peskin told us, "I’m hopeful that by the end of the week you’ll be able to write that Peskin took the baton that Newsom handed him, and while it may not have been as pretty as we might have liked, I’m hopeful that after reversing cuts to health care and [making the additions requested by] the Family Budget Committee, we’ll even be able to dump money back into low-income, affordable, family, and rental housing." *

The budget’s opening battle

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Chris Daly have been engaged in a high-profile clash over city budget priorities in recent weeks. Newsom appeared to win the latest battle when he galvanized an unlikely coalition and Daly clashed with some of his progressive allies, prompting Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin to remove Daly on June 15 as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee.

"This is not about personality, and it shouldn’t be about the mayor’s race. It should be about making sure we have a good budget," Peskin told the Guardian shortly before announcing that he would be taking over as Budget and Finance chair just as the committee was beginning work on approving a budget by July 1.

Yet this latest budget battle was more about personalities and tactical errors than it was about the larger war over the city’s values and spending, areas in which it’s far too early for the Newsom camp to declare victory. The reality is that Newsom’s "back-to-basics budget" — which would increase spending for police and cityscape improvements and cut health services and affordable-housing programs — is still likely to be significantly altered by the progressives-dominated Board of Supervisors.

In fact, while the recent showdown between Newsom and Daly may have been diffused by Daly’s removal as Budget and Finance chair, it’s conceivable that a clash between Newsom and the supervisors is still on the horizon. After all, eight supervisors voted for a $28 million affordable-housing supplemental that Newsom refused to sign, and the mayor could yet be forced to decide whether to sign a budget that lies somewhere between his vision and Daly’s.

Stepping back from recent events and the supercharged rhetoric behind them, a Guardian analysis of the coming budget fight shows that there are difficult and highly political choices to be made that could have profound effects on what kind of city San Francisco becomes.

If Daly wanted to spark a productive dialogue on whether the mayor’s budget priorities are in the best interests of the city, he probably didn’t go about it in the right way. But the approach seemed to be born of frustration that the mayor was refusing to implement a duly approved program for an important public need.

Daly has argued that when he introduced his $28 million affordable-housing supplemental in March, he thought it would be "noncontroversial." Last year the board approved and Newsom signed a $54 million supplemental budget, including $20 million in affordable-housing funds. Daly wrote on his blog that he hoped his latest $28 million request would help "stem the tide of families leaving San Francisco, decrease the number of people forced to live on the streets, and help elders live out their days with some dignity."

But Newsom objected, first criticizing Daly in the media for submitting it too late, then refusing to spend money that had been approved by a veto-proof majority, with only his supervisorial allies Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Ed Jew opposed. Daly pushed back against what he loudly labeled the mayor’s "backdoor veto," which he considered illegal.

"You may not believe the question of affordable housing and affordability is more important than redesigning the city’s Web site or perhaps installing cameras in police cars or fixing a pothole, but to say that the money does not exist is a lie," Daly said at a board meeting.

So when Newsom submitted his final budget June 1, Daly proposed restoring the funding and taking away $37 million from what he called the mayor’s "pet projects." His suggestion triggered a political firestorm, since his targets included a wide array of programs, including $700,000 for a Community Justice Center, $3 million for one police academy class, $10.6 million for street repairs and street trees, $2.1 million to expand the Corridors street cleaning program, and $500,000 for a small-business-assistance center. In their place, Daly argued, the city would be able to restore funds cut from affordable housing, inpatient psychiatric beds, and services for people with AIDS.

In addition to uniting against him those constituencies whose funding he targeted, Daly’s proposed cuts in law enforcement — and his brash, unilateral approach to the issue — threatened to cost him the support of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive with public safety credentials who represents the crime-plagued Western Addition. So it was a precarious situation that became a full-blown meltdown once the Newsom reelection campaign started phone banks and e-mail blasts accusing Daly of endangering public safety and subverting the normal budget process.

Pretty soon, with Daly’s enemies smelling blood in the water, it became a sort of feeding frenzy, and various groups urged their members to mobilize for a noon rally before the June 13 Budget and Finance Committee meeting. "We are a sleeping giant that has awakened," small-business advocate Scott Hauge claimed as he e-mailed other concerned stakeholders, who happened to include Friends of the Urban Forest and public housing activists, thanks to Daly’s call for a $5 million cut in Newsom’s Hope SF plan, which would rebuild public housing projects by allowing developers to also build market-rate condos at the sites.

"Mirkarimi seems to feel strongly about having cops and infrastructure, which are typically the priorities of conservatives," Daly told the Guardian as he announced plans to cancel the June 13 budget hearing, which he did after accusing Newsom of engaging in illegal electioneering.

Daly also accused Newsom of abusing his power by securing the City Hall steps for a budget rally at the same time, date, and place that Daly believed his team had secured — a mess-up city administrator Rohan Lane explained to us as "an unfortunate procedural thing."

But while Daly told us he "needed to hear from progressives who enjoy diversity, because if we don’t get more affordable housing dollars, San Francisco is going to become increasingly white, wealthy, and more conservative," all anyone could hear the next day was a pro-Newsom crowd chanting, "No, Supervisor Daly, no!" outside City Hall.

Newsom spoke at the rally and claimed that Daly’s proposal to cut $5 million from Hope SF would eliminate "$95 million in local money to help rebuild San Francisco’s most distressed public housing," a figure that includes the bond issue Newsom is proposing. With the 700 to 900 market-rate units included in the program, Newsom claims the cuts will cost the city $700 million in housing.

"Stop the balkanization of San Francisco!" Rev. Al Townsend roared, while Housing Authority Commissioner Millard Larkin said, "People are living in housing not fit for animals. Protect policies that give people a decent place to live."

"This is about your priorities," Newsom said as he made the case that fixing potholes, sweeping streets, and putting more cops on the beat are now San Francisco’s top concerns.

"I’ve never seen this type of disrespect to the public process," Newsom said, addressing a crowd that included a couple of Daly supporters holding "Homelessness is not a crime" signs alongside people dressed as trees, a dozen people in orange "Newsom ’07" shirts, Newsom campaign operative Peter Ragone, and former Newsom-backed supervisor candidates Doug Chan and Rob Black (the latter of whom who lost to Daly and now works for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce).

"Gavin Newsom’s budget reflects that he has been listening to you. It’s not something he has dreamed up is his ivory tower," Townsend said, while Kelly Quirke, executive director of Friends of the Urban Forest, pointed out that Daly’s proposal would mean the 1,500 trees that the Department of Public Works planted this year "would not be watered," and Police Commissioner Yvonne Lee said the proposal would "eliminate 50 new officers that could be on streets, plus a $400,000 system to identify the source of gunfire."

What Newsom’s supporters didn’t mention was that his proposed budget, which would add $33 million for the Police Department to help get more officers on the streets and pay existing officers more, also would drastically shift the city’s housing policies by transferring about $50 million from existing affordable-housing and rental-support programs into spending on home ownership and development of market-rate units. And that comes as the city is losing ground on meeting a goal in the General Plan’s Housing Element of making more than 60 percent of new housing affordable for low-income residents.

Daly doesn’t think people fully understand the implications of Hope SF and said public hearings are needed so they "can understand it better." Yet the Newsom rally still touted the mayor’s concern for those in public housing projects.

"We’re not interested in rebuilding unless the tenants are supportive," Doug Shoemaker of the Mayor’s Office of Housing told the Guardian, promising that existing public housing units will be replaced "on a one-to-one basis" and noting that 85 affordable rentals, along with 40 to 50 units for first-time home buyers at a below-market rate (for a household of two with an income of about $58,000 annually) and hundreds of market-rate condos, will be built.

"The market-rate condos will cross-subsidize the rebuilding of public housing," said Shoemaker, who claims that the "lumpiness of the mayor’s budget" — in which home-ownership funding increases by $51 million, while programs benefiting the homeless and senior and families renters appear to have been cut by $48 million — "is best understood over the long term" and is related to the redevelopment projects in Bayview–Hunters Point and Mission Bay.

"The hardest thing about explaining these figures is that it sounds like a game of three-card rummy, but we need to fuel whatever is coming down the pipeline," he said.

The confusing fight over affordable housing has even split its advocates. Coleman Advocates for Children and Their Families publicly urged Daly not to hold Hope SF funds hostage to his housing supplemental, while the Family Budget Coalition urged Newsom and the supervisors to "work together to find at least $60 million during the add-back process to prioritize affordable housing."

But with Daly gone from the Budget and Finance Committee, how will his proposals and priorities fare? Sources say Peskin was irritated with Daly’s budget fight and his recent Progressive Convention — both actions not made in consultation with colleagues — as well as his increasingly public spat with Mirkarimi. Yet Peskin publicly has nothing but praise for Daly and supports many of his priorities.

"We are working with the same schedule that Daly’s office laid out," Peskin said, noting that a lot of the decisions about funding will depend on "what ends up coming from the state." San Francisco could still lose money from the state or federal budget. During a June 18 budget hearing, Sup. Bevan Dufty introduced a motion to amend the mayor’s interim budget by appropriating $4 million for HIV/AIDS services, to be funded by General Fund reserves, for use by the Department of Public Health.

This was one of Daly’s top priorities, and as the hearing proceeded, it became clear that there was a method in the former chair’s apparent budget-dance madness. Newsom’s budget would restore $3.8 million of the $9 million in AIDS grants lost from federal sources, with Newsom asking Congress to backfill the remaining reductions to the Ryan White Care grant. Sup. Sean Elsbernd questioned the wisdom of appropriating $4 million now, when the feds may yet cough up, and Mirkarimi questioned whether doing so would send Washington the message that it doesn’t need to help us.

"It’s a discussion we have every year," Controller Ed Harrington said. He recommended appropriating $4 million now and sending the following message: "Yes, we think this is important, we’ll try and figure out how to fix it, but this shows it isn’t easy. It’s a political call rather than a technical one."

In the end, the Budget and Finance Committee voted 3–1, with Sup. Tom Ammiano (the only supervisor to publicly support Daly’s alternative budget) absent and Elsbernd dissenting, to appropriate $4 million, on the condition that if additional federal and state funds are granted to backfill the Ryan White Care grant, the controller will transfer the $4 million augmentation back to the General Fund.

The same kind of balancing act is expected on Daly’s other suggestions to restore funding for affordable housing and public health departments, so it’s still too early to tell whether his priorities might ultimately win the war after losing the battle.*

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

For more details on the city budget process and a schedule of Budget and Finance Committee meetings, visit www.tiny.cc/BJRSN.

Ghostbusters

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Entertainment commissioner Audrey Joseph is, by her own assessment, a tough cookie. She successfully beat back a developer’s efforts to close her old SoMa nightclub. She attended her first Halloween in the Castro as a windup doll. And when skinheads targeted the famously gay Halloween event in the late 1980s, Joseph helped form the Gay Guards. But for all that, she is the first to admit that her latest gig — which involves helping Sup. Bevan Dufty and Mayor Gavin Newsom move Halloween festivities out of the Castro — won’t be easy.

"Sometimes I feel like a whipping post," Joseph told the Guardian the day after she gave the city’s first public presentation of the Dufty-Newsom plan to move the event into a parking lot behind AT&T Park — a lot that just happens to lie in the district of Newsom nemesis Sup. Chris Daly.

With Dufty stuck in traffic, though he did show up later, and Newsom nowhere in sight, Joseph was flying solo May 30 as she laid out their plan to an audience that was composed primarily of middle-aged Castro business and property owners. The city won’t close Market and Castro streets, and it won’t provide portable toilets or entertainment in the Castro, but it will police the area, and Castro merchants will be asked to voluntarily close early.

"We’d love to see the Castro dead," Joseph said as she laid out plans to lure Halloween revelers into the stadium parking lot by holding a concert featuring an as-yet-unnamed mainstream entertainer.

Some Castro residents expressed ambivalence about killing off what one attendee said amounts to "a sacred holiday" for the gay community, others pointed out that it would take a major hip-hop artist to lure the bridge-and-tunnel crowd to a concert that will cost $10 to $25 a pop, and bar owner Greg Bronstein questioned the sanity of closing early on what is the busiest business night of the year. Deputy police chief David Shinn pointed out that unlike New York’s 30,000-strong police force, which can encircle the Big Apple’s Halloween parade, the San Francisco Police Department’s 2,400 officers cannot ring the Castro.

"We’ve heard everyone’s cries about wanting Halloween out of the Castro," Joseph told the crowd. But her headache stemmed from the fact that her audience represented a small but highly vocal fraction of the 49,839 registered voters in Dufty’s district — and similarly small but vocal groups exist in Daly’s district too. Rincon Tenants Association president David Osgood decries the proposed plan as "the worst case of NIMBYism."

"This is an obvious effort by one neighborhood to get rid of their own event," Osgood told the Guardian. "But people are going to go to the Castro anyway. Halloween in the Castro has a flamboyance you don’t get anywhere else. Moving Halloween to the Embarcadero is like trying to move Mardi Gras out of New Orleans to Omaha. It’s just not going to work. It needs to be planned where it is."

But Joseph has high hopes for AT&T Park as a Halloween site, even though she has had a hard time finding event promoters. "The site is bigger, there’s less residential impact, it’s right on a Muni line, and we won’t have to stop traffic on the Embarcadero during rush hour when we’re setting up," she said.

Defending the lack of community meetings about Halloween in the past six months (something Newsom and Dufty had promised), Joseph said, "The city had to debrief from last year’s event, make a plan, and get Supervisors Dufty and Chris Daly to sign off on it, since both districts are involved, then meet with the mayor, the port, and a string of musical promoters."

As for concerns that people will just show up in the Castro or drift there once the city pulls the plug on the stadium parking lot concert at 10 p.m., Joseph said, "I’m open to suggestions. I’m trying to create a safe and fun environment where people say, ‘Wow, this is a great party!’ instead of coming to the Castro, looking terrified, and holding on to each other — for the thrill of what? Being stabbed or shot?" *

Selling wi-fi

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Just before a Board of Supervisors committee finally considered Mayor Gavin Newsom’s controversial free wireless Internet plan May 14, supporters of the mayor staged a rally on the steps of City Hall. The event featured African American ministers, Latino students, and Chinese senior citizens demanding that the city hurry up and bridge the digital divide by approving Newsom’s deal with Google and EarthLink.

"Wi-fi for All" was part of an aggressive push for the plan by Newsom’s reelection campaign team — which organized the rally and a letter-writing campaign aimed at supervisors — yet one that has been denounced as a race-baiting fraud by critics who have long argued that the deal does little to put connected computers in the hands of poor folks and that it’s a better deal for the corporate partners than it is for city residents.

"Chinatown is at the bottom of the line," Self Help for Seniors president Annie Chung announced as busloads of seniors stood up and silently waved their "Wi-fi for All" signs on cue.

"Forty percent of the Latino community do not own or have access to a computer," city resident Ricardo Alva added, while Rev. Arnold Townsend thundered, "Everybody who is opposed to this is going home and online."

Yet Newsom’s contract effectively creates a world of first- and second-class cybercitizens. Those who can afford to pay $22 a month can sign up for EarthLink’s premium service, which gives them a competitive and fast connection speed of 1,000 kilobits per second, plus free relay equipment (such as an antenna if they have reception problems). But those who can’t afford to pay get an account that lets Google do free market research in exchange for slow-speed (300 kbps) service that does not cover the $50 to $200 cost of equipment they might need to receive a connection indoors.

A new study by the Office of the Controller finds that 82 percent of city residents use a computer at home and 80 percent of those use it to access the Internet. So the service is aimed primarily at the 20 percent of folks who have a computer but no Internet access, those who might want to drop their existing service, or those who want to Web-surf in parks and other public spaces. The controller’s City Survey 2007 also notes that while more than 80 percent of the north, central, and west regions are connecting to the Internet at home, only 70 percent of the southeastern neighborhoods do so.

"Between 1998 and 2007, Southeast residents bought home PCs at a slower pace," the survey states, observing that whites are "2.1 times more likely to have Internet access than African Americans." Of non–college graduates, "those over 60 years and particularly Latinos, those without access are even less likely now to get online."

So there’s a certain logic to the mayor’s use of the race card, at least until the public scrutinizes whether universality of access, speed, service, equipment, support, and training are guaranteed under his deal. But Newsom has been unwilling to discuss the proposal with the Board of Supervisors or entertain modifying the deal since he emerged from a Google-chartered Bombardier corporate jet with visions of free wi-fi dancing in his head following an economic summit in Davos, Switzerland.

But supervisors have pushed the city’s Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) to investigate the feasibility of city-owned wi-fi and high-speed fiber optics. Those reports, finally made available this spring, confirmed what wi-fi experts had been saying all along: municipal wi-fi is feasible, and fiber is a necessary backbone and complementary service in a city whose famed fog and hills make wireless Internet access a spotty proposition at best and a nonexistent one at worst.

Tim Pozar, CEO of United Layer, which installed free Internet at the Alice Griffith housing project, told us, "The extreme difficulty of reaching users inside of buildings makes the Google-EarthLink wi-fi strategy the worst possible model for bringing Internet to low-income communities which don’t have it yet."

Eric Brooks, a member of PublicNet San Francisco, a newly formed coalition of community groups and Internet professionals, dismisses as "ludicrous" the notion that people will cancel cable and DSL to sign up for EarthLink’s premium service, which the controller’s report said would save city residents $9 million to $18 million annually.

"I have dial-up, and I’m on the third floor of my building, so I’m not gonna cancel my dial-up, because the wi-fi won’t be reliable," Brooks says. And Ralf Muehlen, director of SFLan, a nonprofit that already provides free wi-fi Internet access to hundreds of San Franciscans, wonders who is going to want to pay EarthLink $22 a month "when AT&T sells a 50 percent faster service for $20."

Asked about these concerns, Emy Tseng, project director of the city’s Digital Inclusion program, acknowledges that wi-fi is like cell phones and broadcast TV when it comes to spotty, unreliable reception.

"You might get a stronger signal if your window is facing a light pole or if you have a wireless router, like an antenna or rabbit ears," says Tseng, who is currently talking to manufacturers about getting discounts on computers and relay equipment in an effort to reach an estimated 150,000 underserved residents.

According to the Newsom-negotiated contract, EarthLink will pay the city 5 percent of gross revenues from its subscription services, and these funds will allow the city to try to bridge the gaps in the city’s ever-widening digital divide. Brian Roberts of the DTIS says the city anticipates receiving a minimum of $75,000 in digital inclusion funds per quarter if all goes well and at least $200,000 if the deal breaks down.

"Cost is becoming less of a factor as computer equipment prices fall," says Tseng, who is trying to build community-based support programs within neighborhoods. She believes the two-square-mile pilot project required of EarthLink to prove that its network is feasible will be built in underserved neighborhoods, not downtown, as some critics have feared.

Yet the American Civil Liberties Union warns that Newsom’s deal raises unresolved security and privacy concerns. Blogger Sasha Magee of www.leftinsf.com gives Newsom credit for having opened up a serious discussion about digital inclusion and the government’s role in trying to ensure that everyone has access to the opportunities the Internet represents: "To his credit, the contributions of activists and service providers around digital inclusion programs have been listened to," Magee wrote. "What has not been listened to, however, is the input on what the network should be." *

The waiting wife

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While Chief Warrant Officer 2 Shurd Rice pilots a helicopter over bloodbaths in Iraq, his wife, Jane, peers at crustaceans through a microscope in a Tiburon laboratory 7,500 miles away and tries not to think about what’s happening to her husband.

"I worry more about Shurd’s sanity than his safety," said Rice, a research technician, who recently learned her husband won’t be home from Iraq until Halloween, thanks to a three-month extension of his tour of duty that he found out about on CNN.

"Just like that, they pull the finishing line away," Rice told the Guardian. "It’s soul destroying. I can’t watch the news anymore, waiting for a withdrawal time line that just turns into dust."

Rice, who was born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa, says she’s "used to crazy leaders…. So Bush made an error, but to do it over and over again? And his refusal to discuss getting out of Iraq leaves me speechless."

Losing herself in the world of science doesn’t protect Rice from learning about day-to-day horrors in Iraq, since the details spill into her husband’s frequent calls and e-mails.

In a recent e-mail, he wrote about atrocities that happened in an Iraqi village after an improvised explosive device blew up one of the commanders in the Iraqi Army.

"Somehow [the Iraqi Army] knew [whoever detonated the IED] was from a nearby Iraqi village," Shurd wrote, "so they rolled in there to ‘interrogate’ the village and find the trigger man." The interrogation consisted of "beating the women and children of the village, until they finally gave up the fella," he wrote. "But the original call for medivac came in for the trigger man himself, and the injuries were as follows: multiple gun shot wounds to the feet and hands, and rectal bleeding. That’s business Iraqi style."

For Rice, living in the Bay Area, where Shurd grew up and used to be a musician, means she faces painful judgments of her husband’s decision to enlist.

"This attitude that because you signed up, you must deserve it, you have it coming — that’s hard to field, but people like Shurd are the only ones standing between the self-righteous people and the draft," she says. "And Shurd turns all judgments on their heads. He’s the most nonjudgmental person I know. He’s always giving me a hard time for judging, so when people say, ‘Where’s your husband?’ and I say, ‘Iraq,’ and I see that look in their eyes, I think, oh my god! They’re judging him."

Rice met Shurd in South Africa when she was 18 and two weeks out of high school.

"I was working at a restaurant where I had to wear a big old 16th-century dress, and Shurd was painting a mural on the wall. He was so impressive, this world-traveling artist guy."

As a South African, Rice said, she didn’t have any preconceived notions about the military when Shurd joined the US Army two years after they met.

"It sounds naive now, but at the time it seemed like an adventure," says Rice, who, along with her husband, never imagined that Sept. 11, 2001, was lurking around the corner.

As Shurd wrote in a recent e-mail, "Guess I wasn’t paying attention enough to politics to see that coming. But I knew a vehicle for blind patriotism when I saw it and was sure someone was gonna pay, and a lot of people were gonna get paid because of it, and not only was I gonna be along for the ride, like it or not, I was sure to have a front row to see us do something foolish."

On point

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> sarah@sfbg.com

April has been an exceptionally busy month for the artists at the Hunters Point Shipyard. In addition to dusting off work spaces in preparation for the upcoming Spring Open Studio, the 300-member colony is scrambling to track the implications of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s ever-shifting effort to keep the 49ers in town, particularly as it affects the artists who have rented space at the base for 30 years.

Newsom’s latest proposal involves building a football stadium in the shipyard rather than at Candlestick Point. That’s likely to displace a group that claims to be the largest colony of artists in the nation – unless the mayor can find a place for them in his hasty plans.

"Hellzapoppin’" is how shipyard artist Marc Ellen Hamel described the recent flurry of redevelopment-related meetings. Newsom says he needs to fast-track the transfer of the shipyard from the Navy to the city if he is to meet the 49ers’ deadline for being in a new stadium by 2012.

The blitz was triggered by the 49ers’ announcement in December 2006 that they were considering a move to Santa Clara – which team officials in part blamed on Newsom’s inattention – leading some Bayview-Hunters Point residents to complain that they’re paying the price for the administration’s fumble. Newsom has proposed folding Candlestick Point and the shipyard into a giant 2,000-acre redevelopment project – to be managed by the Lennar Corp., whose profits are nose-diving and which is being sued for alleged whistle-blower retaliation in connection with its failure to control toxic asbestos dust at the site.

"Newsom’s latest plan confirms his critics’ worst fears that this is a bait and switch," said builder Brian O’Flynn, who was part of last year’s referendum drive to put the city’s previous Bayview-Hunters Point redevelopment plan on the ballot and this year’s lawsuit to force a vote. "This latest plan is about political coverage for the mayor in an election year."

His group, Defend BVHP Committee, was already concerned about Newsom’s role in thwarting a vote on the old plan and has even more concerns about the new plan. "If the 49ers leave and the stadium plan is off the table, then Newsom’s latest proposal will make way for more condos for Lennar," O’Flynn told the Guardian.

Matt Dorsey of the City Attorney’s Office said that regardless of whether the city was right to strike down the referendum – as he maintains state case law required – the new plan will get more scrutiny. The Board of Supervisors voted in February to support Newsom’s approach to the shipyard but stipulated that the terms of any such transfer "require approval by the Recreation and Park Commission, the Board of Supervisors, and such other possible approvals, including voter approval."

The artists’ colony is waiting to learn the specifics of Lennar’s redevelopment proposal, which talks of creating "permanent space for the artists at Hunters Point Shipyard," along with new waterfront parks, 8,500 units of housing, and job-generating development. So far, Michael Cohen of the Mayor’s Office and Lennar’s Kofi Bonner are only shopping around what they call a "conceptual framework," which vaguely describes the parameters for merging the yard and Candlestick Point.

The city has promised to replace all existing low-income housing at the Alice Griffith projects and to phase in new units carefully so as not to displace current residents. The artists have not received such promises. They don’t know if they’ll end up paying double the price for half the space they currently occupy, which amounts to 248,400 square feet, according to building 101 artist David Trachtenberg.

But with Lennar announcing a two-year planning goal and talking about an arts-themed development, the colony is formuutf8g its own ideas about how such a plan could work.

"The shipyard is almost like an artists’ retreat," Estelle Akamine told us, as five colleagues spoke passionately about the light, desolation, and poppies that attract artists to the base.

"But it didn’t always feel like a retreat," recalled Akamine, who has rented at the shipyard for 18 years. "There was a lot of trauma in the 1980s when we thought that the USS Missouri was going to be home-ported here. So we’re very skeptical of plans. We were born out of politics."

The Mayor’s Office claims the city is working to expedite the cleanup and transfer of the shipyard not only to adhere to the 49ers’ timeline but also to "allow us to move forward with community benefits like parks, affordable housing, and jobs for the Bayview." Trachtenberg believes the mayor has a strong interest in keeping artists at the yard too.

Newsom promotes his proposal as a way to create jobs and revitalize the BVHP economy. Akamine said, "Artists are the tip of the iceberg. We’re the visible part of a huge, largely hidden industry." Recalling how artists in SoMa fell victim to the dot-com boom at the end of the ’90s, Akamine hopes such displaced organizations will be able to relocate to the shipyard.

"Why can’t we have galleries and suppliers down here too?" she asked.

April Hankins, who rents a studio in building 117, wants to see "performance space for productions, community theater and music, and touring groups. We are discussing space for classes. Ideally, it could make San Francisco a destination for the arts."

Dimitri Kourouniotis, who rents in building 116, is stoic about the inconvenience he’s already endured, thanks to the Navy’s radiological remediation on Parcel B, where his studio is situated.

"We have already had to leave temporarily," said Kourouniotis, explaining how a three-week project to remove radiological contamination from sewers and pipes ended up taking five months and left six buildings without running water or plumbing.

Hamel, who’s rented a studio in building 101 for 15 years, wants people to know that there’s "nothing wrong" with the artists at the shipyard. "We’re not contaminated, and none of the artists have had problems with illness from possible toxic elements," she says, while Hankins compares artists to the athletes that Newsom is apparently scrambling so hard to keep.

"Both need an arena in which to exhibit increasing skill," Hankins says. "An artist’s work and an athlete’s performance is their gift to their audience. In showing patronage, ball games with high ticket prices are attended; art is collected. In communities and teams, both nourish the culture of the city for which they perform. It would be a great loss to the Bay Area to have the shipyard artist community become a redevelopment casualty." *

Spring Open Studio runs April 28-29, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., at the Hunters Point Shipyard. For more information, go to www.springopenstudio.com.

Who blinked?

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf has been free for more than a week, but the debate over why the federal government released him after 226 days in jail is only getting murkier.

First a US Attorney’s Office press release April 3 claimed that Wolf "complied with the grand jury subpoena." Next a San Francisco Chronicle headline April 4 declared, "Blogger Freed after Giving Up Video." Then a Chronicle op-ed April 9 by the California First Amendment Coalition’s executive director, Peter Scheer, claimed Wolf’s case never should have become a constitutional cause célèbre "because he never had evidence."

"In retrospect," Scheer wrote, "Wolf’s jailing looks like a huge misunderstanding, in which prosecutors assumed, incorrectly, that Wolf possessed relevant evidence, while Wolf believed, erroneously, that he had a responsibility to go to jail even if he had no relevant evidence."

Wolf disagrees with all the above, beginning with the prosecutor’s claim that he complied with the subpoena.

"If I complied, then journalists will be happy to know that the meaning of ‘complied’ has changed," Wolf said, noting that he never capitulated to the feds’ demands that he testify under oath before a grand jury about a July 2005 Mission District protest that turned violent, parts of which he captured on video and excerpts of which were aired shortly thereafter on national television.

Wolf was more forgiving of the Chron‘s misleading headline because, as he put it, "headline writers don’t write the story, and the story itself was accurate." That said, the truth, according to Wolf, is that only after the feds gave up their demand that he testify did he agree to post his unedited video.

It’s a subtle distinction that was missing from some coverage of his release from federal prison, but it’s a significant omission that makes Wolf’s decision look like a coerced surrender. Wolf emphasized, "The subpoena demanded I give up my video and testify before a grand jury."

As for Scheer’s argument that Wolf shouldn’t have gone to prison for nothing, Wolfe said it misses the crucial point: complying with a federal subpoena hurts a journalist’s standing with sources.

"You can’t decide to only protect material if it’s of evidentiary value. And Scheer sidestepped the issue of testimony and the fact that the government agreed to not make me testify before a grand jury," Wolf told us.

The problem with grand juries, at least from a journalistic perspective, is that their inquisitional power is unlimited and their proceedings are secret. In other words, journalists can be suspected of snitching yet can’t prove they haven’t, all of which adds up to the kiss of death for reporters who cultivate the trust of confidential sources.

Wolf said he offered to give up his tape but did not offer to testify about it, as early as November 2006, but the feds rejected the latter part of his demand. Once they did agree in April that he wouldn’t have to testify about the tape’s contents, Wolf said there was no longer any point in refusing to release the tape itself.

Releasing the tape, Wolf said, helped put to rest the "suspicion that I had any relevant evidence."

"Sure, Josh had developed sources in the anarchist community, but that’s not what this was about," Wolf attorney James Wheaton told us. "It was about refusing to appear before the grand jury and testify or name names."

With a parallel debate raging about whether bloggers are journalists, Wolf said he hopes people will give him the benefit of the doubt and say he should have been protected.

"I believe my action served to be the strongest case for the need for a federal shield law," Wolf said. Local officials agree.

"What happened to Mr. Wolf is stark evidence that we need a federal shield law to make sure this does not happen again," District Attorney Kamala Harris said April 3.

Harris’s support for Wolf also highlights questions about the role San Francisco police officials played in this mess.

As part of the settlement that secured his release, Wolf answered no to two questions: did he see anybody throw anything at the squad car that was part of an alleged arson, and did he see whom SFPD officer Peter Shields was chasing before his skull got fractured?

"Answering questions about which you know nothing is not a violation of journalistic ethics," Wheaton told the Guardian. "But those same questions prove that law enforcement misused the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which was set up to investigate terrorism but which they used to get around California’s shield laws."

Public records show that the SFPD requested the help of the JTTF and the FBI to investigate the assault on Shields. That assault should be under the jurisdiction of the DA’s Office. But by framing the case as an alleged arson to a car, for which the department received some funds courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security, law enforcement was able to federalize the investigation.

With Wolf’s unedited video showing one police officer wildly pointing his gun at protesters in apparent violation of the SFPD’s general orders, questions remain as to who will hold law enforcement accountable for what’s on this long-disputed tape. *

Politics Blog: the new Josh Wolf scandal

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@@http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2007/04/free_josh_wolf_from_the_media.html@@

Unanswered questions

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Bayview–Hunters Point resident Espanola Jackson says her phone rang off the hook after the San Francisco Chronicle printed her photo — but none of her concerns — under the headline "Residents Like Plan to Revitalize Area." It was part of the newspaper’s extensive coverage of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s plan to rebuild the community around a football stadium.

"People called to say, ‘You need to sue the Chronicle,’ " Jackson told the Guardian. Newsom wants to entrust Florida-based developer Lennar Corp. with cleaning up the five highly contaminated Hunters Point Shipyard parcels. Jackson finds this plan worrisome because, as the Guardian recently revealed ("The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07), Lennar was cited multiple times last year for failing to monitor and control dust and asbestos at Parcel A, the first and only piece of the shipyard that the Navy has released to the city as ready for development. Lennar is also being sued by three employees for allegations of racially charged whistle-blower retaliation in connection with the problems on Parcel A (see "Dust Still Settling," 3/28/07).

Beyond her problems with Lennar, Jackson worries that Newsom’s plan doesn’t account for climate change or the true cost of shipyard cleanup.

"Because of global warming, that entire area is going to be underwater," Jackson said. "And if Michael Cohen [of the Mayor’s Office of Base Reuse] and the rest of them are really interested in cleaning up the area, they should send a resolution to the Board of Supervisors requesting that Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi appropriate $5 billion, which is what it will really take to clean up the shipyard."

Jackson was also frustrated that neither the Hunters Point Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board, which is composed of local residents, tenants, and environmental and community groups, nor the regulators overseeing the cleanup have been consulted by the mayor in his haste to try to keep the 49ers in town by quickly building a new stadium.

Jackson, who bought a home in the Bayview 34 years ago, said residents want a thorough cleanup, not a rush job. That was what city residents said in November 2000 when they overwhelmingly approved Proposition P, demanding that no transfer of property take place "until the entire Shipyard is cleaned to residential standards."

"It’s a landfill, and it needs to be removed," Jackson said.

Yet Lennar, which won the contract to redevelop the shipyard, is in a worsening financial position to deal with unexpected challenges at the site. The company’s profits plummeted more than 70 percent in the first quarter of 2007 because of the slumping housing market. Jackson doesn’t believe the cleanup will cost $300 million, a figured touted by Cohen, but she questions where the cleanup money will come from.

"Only white folks will be able to afford the 8,900 housing units that Lennar is proposing to build near the stadium," Jackson said.

The Chronicle‘s overwhelmingly positive coverage of the mayor’s shipyard plan came shortly after Lennar Urban president Kofi Bonner wrote to the Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency claiming that articles in the Guardian and the Chronicle about Lennar’s asbestos and dust problems at the shipyard and the lawsuit by employees "are full of errors, inaccuracies and misinformation."

Asked what errors Bonner was referring to, Lennar spokesperson Sam Singer told the Guardian, "My main complaint is with the lawsuit, which contains numerous false allegations, and with the Chronicle‘s article, which called these employees ‘executives.’ " Lennar has not requested any corrections of Guardian articles.

Asked about the lawsuit’s claim that Bonner sat by and allowed the alleged discrimination to happen, Singer told us, "Kofi is one of the leading African American executives in the nation." Neither Bonner nor Lennar vice president Paul Menaker, who are both named in the whistle-blower suit, returned the Guardian‘s calls as of press time.

Attorney Angela Alioto, who represents the three African American Lennar employees suing the company, told the Guardian that Singer’s defense of Bonner is "racist."

"Just because Kofi is African American means he couldn’t discriminate?" Alioto asked.

Equally disturbing is the Mayor’s Office’s reliance on Lennar for accurate information about the developer’s performance at the shipyard. When the Guardian contacted Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard for comment about Lennar, he wrote to the Guardian, "You might want to give Sam Singer a call. He’s the spokesperson for Lennar and can really answer questions about that stuff … accurately."

After making it clear that we wanted Newsom’s perspective, not Lennar’s, Ballard wrote that the Mayor’s Office is "confident the systems we have in place will protect human health," an answer that dodges our question about the violations that happened over a six-month period in 2006.

Insisting that Lennar will not be asked to take over the cleanup, Ballard claimed that "if the city pursues an ‘early transfer’ with the Navy, a specialized environmental remediation firm, not Lennar, would finish certain elements of the cleanup. And the city will have extensive oversight over any such work."

Ballard refused to comment on the suit brought against Lennar by three of its employees but went into detail about the Restoration Advisory Board, which he said was "created by the Navy to advise the Navy."

"The city created its own Citizens Advisory Board independent of the Navy for local input from the Bayview community," Ballard claimed.

He also maintained that the "Navy is and will always remain legally responsible for paying for the cleanup. Over the last three to four years, we have secured more cleanup money for the shipyard than any other closed Navy base in the county. We intend to have those robust funding levels continue."

This was also one of the most toxic bases in the country, which is why the conversion effort has been difficult. Plaintiff Guy McIntyre also alleges it is complicated because of chicanery. Before being demoted, McIntyre said he told his bosses there were "severe discrepancies in the invoicing submitted by Gordon Ball," which has a $20 million construction contract with Lennar.

"Specifically, while Gordon Ball stated that over $1 million was going to a certain minority-owned subcontractor, only a small fraction of that money was actually going to the subcontractor," the lawsuit contends.

We have been trying to review those public records, so far without success. James Fields, contract compliance supervisor for the Redevelopment Agency, told us that Gordon Ball subcontracted with several minority business enterprises, including Michael Spencer Masonry, Oliver Transbay, Remediation Services, Bayview Hunters Point Trucking, and Gordon Ball’s joint-venture partner, Yerba Buena.

Fields said, "I have been advised that the project manager usually presides over the collection of the data but that they are out of the country. Because the project is substantially completed, we will ask the prime contractor, which is Ball, and the minority business enterprises and the women business enterprises under Ball to show us how much they were paid, then compare the sets of records."

In other words, there are still more unanswered questions about Lennar and its subcontractors. *

Wolf freed!

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After spending more than seven months in prison for refusing to give a federal grand jury video outtakes of a 2005 anarchist protest, freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf’s is today being released. According to one of Wolf’s lawyers, David Greene of the Oakland-based First Amendment Project, Wolf won’t have to testify to the grand jury or identify protesters shown in his video, which has now been posted at his Web site, www.joshwolf.net/blog.

The deal was announced the day after a second three-hour mediation session before a federal magistrate in San Francisco. The 24-year-old Wolf has been held in contempt of court by a federal judge since August 2006 and has been imprisoned longer than any other journalist in U.S. history for withholding information. He is reportedly being picked up from the federal correctional facility in Dublin this afternoon and will appear on the steps of San Francisco City Hall at 5 p.m.

Greene said that the April 3 breakthrough occurred when federal prosecutors dropped their insistence that Wolf testify to the grand jury about people he interviewed for his video. Greene said Wolf was prepared to turn over the outtakes last November if he’d been excused from testifying but prosecutors refused.

In an April 3 press release, Greene wrote, “For the last several months, this (dispute) has been principally about the testimony and not about the video. The only reason he decided to publish (the video) now was their assurances that they would not require his testimony.”

Greene said prosecutors required only that Wolf answer two questions under oath, in writing: whether he ever saw anyone throw or shoot any object at a police car or learned about anyone who did so, and whether he knew who Officer Peter Shields was trying to arrest when he was hit from behind and suffered a fractured skull. Wolf answered no to both questions in a court filing today.

In a separate filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffery Finigan said Wolf has complied with the grand jury subpoena and should be released from prison. Finigan also noted the government has reserved the right to issue a new subpoena to Wolf in the future.

“I think his sacrifice of his personal liberty for 226 days for the sake of a principle that was for something much larger than him personally was really commendable,” Greene said.

Rick Knee of the National Writers Union say his group believes that, “Josh’s persecution at the hands of the San Francisco Police Department, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco, federal prosecutor Jeffrey Finigan, the federal grand jury and U.S. District Judge William Alsup was morally and ethically reprehensible, and an egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars.”

Dust still settling

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› sarah@sfbg.com

A racially charged lawsuit by a trio of Lennar Corp. employees accuses the developer of exploiting and endangering Bayview–Hunters Point residents. It also offers an inside look at how the company responded to an asbestos dust scandal first reported by the Guardian ("The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07) and raises questions about Mayor Gavin Newsom’s plan to give Lennar more control over the toxic Hunters Point Shipyard.

The suit was filed by three prominent African American community members — Clementine Clarke, Gary McIntyre, and Ceola Richardson — whom Lennar, a Florida-based megadeveloper, hired as liaisons to the community and its subcontractors. They are represented by attorney Angela Alioto, a former supervisor and mayoral candidate. The lawsuit alleges racial discrimination and harassment (mostly by local Lennar vice president Paul Menaker), retaliation for whistle-blowing, failure to prevent discrimination and harassment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The plaintiffs allege that Menaker, who is white, made disparaging comments about African American workers and community members. "Menaker frequently yells at Plaintiff and other African-American employees, but does not yell at non African-Americans," alleges the lawsuit, which also accuses Menaker of delaying payments to African American clients but not to those of other races.

The plaintiffs also claim that after Minister Christopher Muhammed of the Muhammed University of Islam, which sits adjacent to the Parcel A site where Lennar is working and was exposed to dust from the project, brought his students to Redevelopment Agency meetings and asked that construction cease until the school was permanently relocated, Menaker referred to him as a "shakedown artist."

Perhaps of greater concern to the public are the lawsuit’s allegations that Lennar executives ignored McIntyre’s warnings that Lennar subcontractor Gordon Ball was neglecting to control dust at the site and that Lennar employees were ordered to maintain a "code of silence" about subcontractor CH2M Hill’s failure to monitor asbestos, for which Lennar was cited by local and state officials. McIntyre claims that after blowing the whistle on Gordon Ball, he was demoted and denied further information on how the company was handling dust, even as he was expected to tell the community that Lennar was taking all the necessary steps to protect public health.

Lennar spokesperson Sam Singer told the Guardian the lawsuit contains "numerous false allegations" — then pointed the finger at McIntyre.

"Gary McIntyre was in charge of overseeing contracts," Singer told us. "It was on his watch when incidents of dust occurred, and members of the black community called up and complained and demanded that he be replaced. Were there some violations? Yes. Were they disastrous? No. People in the community didn’t want Gary in that position. Numerous dust mitigation workshops were held by Lennar and Arc Ecology, and in September we held a special meeting to discuss the violations."

Clarke, a Newsom-appointed fire commissioner and Lennar’s community benefits manager, told us she felt "stuck between a rock and a hard place" when Menaker told her and McIntyre not to mention the asbestos dust monitoring had been botched. By then, Clarke recalled, McIntyre had already been demoted for criticizing subcontractor Gordon Ball.

"Gary had been complaining to Paul Menaker that the leadership at Gordon Ball was not following the dust control policy," Clarke said. "Gary was constantly trying to get Gordon Ball to do what was right. After Gary was demoted, he was placed on Porta-Potty and Baker Tank duty."

"It was done to make me quit," McIntyre told us of his demotion. "Before that, I was told that I need to back off subcontractor Gordon Ball, then I was deliberately taken out of the loop."

The allegations cast a new light on Lennar’s claims to us that it volunteered the information about the faulty asbestos monitoring, suggesting the company might have been concerned about McIntyre blowing the whistle to city officials who were already asking questions about dust and asbestos levels.

The day after McIntyre’s Aug. 1, 2006, demotion, Menaker told Clarke and McIntyre the asbestos monitoring data could not be verified.

"I would have liked to see a report from CH2M Hill on what exactly happened," McIntyre told us. "First I heard it was record falsification, then human error, then a problem employee, then battery malfunction. I complained to my manager, Paul Menaker, but I never saw a report."

Clarke and McIntyre said Lennar’s code of silence left them in an awkward position within their community.

"When the community was asking, ‘What’s up with asbestos and dust?’ Gary was to go out and explain," Clarke told us. "So when Gary was taken off the project but his name was kept in the community as project manager, I said, ‘Y’all have cut this man’s testicles off by taking him off this site.’ "

"How can you go out and talk to the community about dust if you’re not in the loop?" McIntyre asked us. "But it wasn’t just a code of silence. It was also that we were blind and deaf, since we couldn’t see reports or attend meetings."

All three say they began to feel like Lennar was hurting their community.

"To me," McIntyre told us, "Minister Muhammed represents the African American community. When I looked his schoolkids in the eye, I thought these kids are thinking that I’m the one who is doing this to them."

Things came to a head for McIntyre at Newsom’s Feb. 10 town hall meeting in Bayview.

Observing that Lennar had been issued with notices of violation and that public health concerns had been raised, Newsom asked, "Is someone from Lennar here to secure my confidence?"

"I waited for Kofi [Bonner, president of Lennar Urban] and Paul to say something, but they didn’t even show up," McIntyre recalled. "So I took the mic, looked the minister in the eyes, and said, ‘We have carried out an investigation, placed additional monitors in the community. We’re trying to keep you and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency up to date.’ "

When someone in the town hall audience accused Lennar of "harming a community that’s already been harmed," McIntyre said. "We’re taking the most aggressive steps we could."

But inside he felt that he had been made into Lennar’s scapegoat. "I wouldn’t have taken this job if I’d known," McIntyre said.

Clarke agreed. "All you’ve got is your name. The corporation tried to take all that away. At least now I can sleep at night."

Six days after the meeting, Newsom proposed accelerating the transfer of the shipyard from the Navy to the city and Lennar in order to facilitate construction of a new stadium for the 49ers. Newsom’s spokespeople did not return calls for comment. *

The corporation that ate San Francisco

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› sarah@sfbg.com

For the past decade, Florida-based megadeveloper Lennar Corp. has been snatching up the rights to the Bay Area’s former naval bases, those vast stretches of land that once housed the Pacific Fleet but are now home to rats, weeds, and in some places, low-income renters.

When the Navy pulled out of Hunters Point Shipyard in 1974, it left behind a landscape pitted with abandoned barracks, cracked runways, spooky radiation laboratories, antique cranes, rusting docks, and countless toxic spills.

A quarter century later, Lennar came knocking at the shipyard’s door — and those of other military bases abandoned in the waning days of the cold war — recognizing these toxic wastelands as the last frontier of underdeveloped land in urban American and an unparalleled opportunity to make big money.

Lennar had already won its first battle in 1997, seizing control of the Bay Area’s former military pearl in Vallejo when it was named master developer for the old Mare Island Naval Shipyard. Two years later it almost lost its bid for Hunters Point Shipyard when a consultant for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency recommended giving the development rights to the Ohio-based Forest City.

Lennar fought back, calling on politically connected friends and citing its deep pockets and its track record at Mare Island.

A parade of Lennar supporters, many of them friends of then-mayor Willie Brown and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, told the Redevelopment Agency commissioners that Lennar was the only developer that had bothered to reach out to the Bayview–Hunters Point community. In the end, the commissioners — all of them mayoral appointees — ignored their consultant’s advice and voted for Lennar.

Nobody knows if Forest City would have done a better job. A developer is, after all, a developer. But Lennar’s victory at the shipyard helped it win the rights, four years later, to redevelop Treasure Island — long before it had even broken ground at Hunters Point. And a couple years ago, it parlayed those footholds into an exclusive development agreement for Candlestick Point.

Now the Fortune 500 company, which had revenues of $16.3 billion in 2006, does have a track record at the shipyard. And that performance is raising doubts about whether San Francisco should have entrusted almost its entire undeveloped coastline to a profit-driven corporation that is proving difficult to regulate or hold accountable for its actions.

Sure, Lennar has provided job training for southeast San Francisco residents, set up small-business assistance and community builder programs, and invested $75 million in the first phase of development. That’s the good news.

But on Lennar’s watch, a subcontractor failed to monitor and control dangerous asbestos dust next to a school at the Hunters Point Shipyard, potentially exposing students to a deadly toxin — despite promising to carefully monitor the air and control the construction dust.

And when the homebuilding industry took a nosedive last year, Lennar reneged on its promise to provide needed rental housing on Hunters Point — saying that its profit margins were no longer good enough to make rentals worthwhile. All of which raises questions about whether this company, which is working with Mayor Gavin Newsom to build a stadium at the shipyard to keep the 49ers in town, really has San Francisco’s interests in mind.

Bayview–Hunters Point native Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a physician and a Sierra Club member, called the Lennar deal the "dirty transfer of the shipyard." She told us, "There is no reason why I’d trust Lennar more than I would the Navy and the federal regulators who have stringently worked on the cleanup of Hunters Point Shipyard, and yet it still remains toxic."

"This is just a play to get the shipyard," said Porter Sumchai, whose father was a longshore worker at the shipyard and died from asbestosis.

Part of the problem is systemic: the Redevelopment Agency hands over these giant projects to master, for-profit developers — who can then change the plans based on financial considerations, not community needs. And while Lennar likes to tell decision makers of its massive size and resources, the actual work at these bases has been delegated to limited-liability subsidiaries with far fewer available assets.

In this case, Lennar experienced a 3 percent drop in sales last year, a 29 percent increase in cancellation rates on homes, and a 15 percent dip in its fourth quarter profits. The downturn prompted Lennar’s president and CEO, Stuart Miller, to identify ways to improve what he described in the annual report as the company’s "margin of improvement" in 2007. These included "reducing construction costs by negotiating lower prices, redesigning products to meet today’s market demand and building on land at current market prices."

A Lennar spokesperson, Sam Singer, issued a statement to us saying that "Lennar BVHP is committed to operating responsibly, continually incorporating best community and environmental practices into our everyday business decisions."

But for a look at how Lennar’s model clashes with community interests, you need go no further than the edge of the site where Lennar has been digging up asbestos-laden rock.

DUST IN THE WIND


The Muhammed University of Islam is a small private school that occupies a modest flat-roofed hilltop building on Kiska Road with a bird’s-eye view of the abandoned Hunters Point Shipyard. This year-round K–12 school is affiliated with the Nation of Islam and attracts mostly African American students but also brings in Latino, Asian, and Pacific Islander children, many of whom have had problems in the public school system and whose parents can’t cover the cost of a private school.

"We find a way," the school’s mustachioed and nattily dressed minister, Christopher Muhammed, recently told the Redevelopment Agency in a veiled allusion to the financial nexus between the MUI and the Nation of Islam’s mosque and bakery on Third Street. "Many students aren’t members of our tradition but live across the street, down the street, or come from Oakland and Vallejo."

The minister is asking the Redevelopment Agency, the agency that selected Lennar and oversees the project, to permanently relocate the school. The school’s classrooms and basketball courts sit on the other side of a chain-link fence from Parcel A, which is the first and only plot of land that the Navy has certified at the shipyard as clean and ready for development.

Standing on these courts, the children have been able to watch heavy machinery digging up and moving huge amounts of earth in preparation for the 1,600 condos and town houses that Lennar wants to build on this sunny hillside, which has views of the bay and the rest of the shipyard.

The shipyard’s other five parcels are still part of a federal Superfund site, despite having undergone years of decontamination. Black tarps cover piles of soil that have been tagged as contaminated, and recently, radiological deposits were found in the sewers and soil. The Navy is still cleaning up a long list of nasty toxins, including PCBs and solvents, on Parcels B through F, the land Newsom now wants the city to take over so that it can hastily build a stadium for the 49ers.

But the minister’s request to relocate the MUI isn’t inspired by fear of Navy-related contamination or the impact of a stadium on the neighborhood but rather by the reality that asbestos is naturally present in this hillside and Lennar’s excavation work on the other side of the school’s chain-link fence has been kicking up dust for almost a year.

It’s not that Lennar and the city didn’t know about the asbestos. In April 2000 the environmental impact report for the shipyard reuse noted, "Because asbestos-containing serpentinite rock occurs at Hunters Point Shipyard, construction-related excavation activities could cause chrysotile asbestos associated with serpentinite to become airborne, creating a potentially significant impact to public health and safety."

So when Lennar proposed demolishing abandoned housing and roads and grading and transferring massive amounts of earth on Parcel A, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District demanded an asbestos dust mitigation plan that included sweeping and watering the construction sites and making sure that vehicle tires are washed before drivers exit.

The state Asbestos Air Control Toxic Measure also stipulates that if a school lies within a quarter mile of a construction site, local air districts can require developers to install asbestos dust monitors and shut down their sites whenever asbestos registers 16,000 fibers per cubic meter. The state requires these extra steps because children have higher metabolisms, growing lungs, and longer life expectancy. Plus, they’re lower to the ground and are likely to run, skip, hop, and play ball games that kick up dust.

Although Lennar agreed to abide by the air district’s requirements, the developer failed to properly implement this plan for more than a year.

The air district’s records show that Lennar’s environmental consultant, CH2M Hill, failed to include any air monitoring in its original plan for Parcel A, which is odd because the school is obvious to anyone who visits the site. It was only when the air district pointed out the existence of the Hunters Point Boys and Girls Club, the Milton Meyer Recreation Center, and the MUI, all within the quarter-mile limit, that Lennar agreed, at least on paper, to what the air district describes as "one of the most stringent asbestos dust mitigation plans in the state."

The plan combines the air district’s asbestos requirements with the city’s demands that Lennar limit "ordinary dust" that can cause respiratory irritation and aggravate existing respiratory conditions, such as asthma and bronchitis. Lennar agreed to implement the plan in the summer of 2005 and determine background levels of dust and toxins at the site before work began in the spring of 2006.

But that didn’t happen. For 13 months there is no data to show how much asbestos the MUI students were exposed to, neither for the 10 months before construction started on the cleared site nor for the first three hot and dusty months when Lennar’s subcontractors began massive earth-moving operations next to the school.

You’d think that after these failures became public knowledge, a devastated Lennar would have gotten a black eye and perhaps fired the subcontractors involved. Failing to protect children in a community that’s been the repeat victim of environmental injustice is a public relations nightmare, particularly in a part of town where distrust of redevelopment runs deep, thanks to the travesties in the Fillmore in the 1960s, followed by the city’s recent rejection of a referendum to put the Bayview–Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan to a public vote.

But while Lennar’s executives finally did the right thing last August by alerting the air district and replacing CH2M Hill, they didn’t release their two other subcontractors, Gordon Ball and Luster, nor did they sufficiently rein them in when violations continued, critics have testified at agency meetings.

And instead of apologizing to the air district and the city’s Department of Public Health for making them look like impotent fools, Lennar executives pushed back, contending that asbestos monitoring wasn’t necessary until May 2006 and that they didn’t need to water the tires of private vehicles.

They even listed economic rationalizations for the screwups that did happen. According to a memo marked "confidential" that the Guardian unearthed in the air district’s files, written by the air district’s inspector, Wayne Lee, Lennar stated, "It costs approximately $40,000 a day to stop grading and construction activity" and "Gordon Ball would have to idle about 26 employees on site, and employees tend to look for other work when the work is not consistent."

Meanwhile, the Department of Public Health was left reeling. Environmental health director Dr. Rajiv Bhatia told us, "It was very disappointing. We worked very hard. We wanted this system to be health protective. Whenever things don’t work, it takes time to get back to levels of trust. This hurts trust and credibility."

In September 2006 the air district issued Lennar a notice of violation for the period of July 14, 2005, through Aug. 3, 2006. Lee wrote that vegetation removal on the site "disturbed the soil and in some cases, likely resulted in dust." He also made it clear that "any track onto common roads could be tracked out to public thoroughfares and create asbestos dust plumes."

Lennar’s fines have yet to be determined, but they could reach into millions of dollars. State fines for emitting air contaminants range from $1,000 a day, if the violation wasn’t the result of intentional or negligent conduct, to $75,000 a day, if the conduct was deemed willful and intentional.

But as the air district weighs the evidence, one thing’s for sure: this wasn’t an isolated case of one set of monitors failing or one subcontractor screwing up. This case involves numerous violations and three subcontractors, two of which — Gordon Ball and Luster — are still working next to the MUI (neither company returned our calls).

Records show that once Lennar fired its environmental compliance subcontractor, CH2M Hill, properly installed monitors immediately detected asbestos dust, triggering 15 health-protective shutdowns during the course of the next six months. From these results, is it reasonable to conclude that had Lennar got its monitoring right from the beginning, further shutdowns would have cost Lennar’s construction subcontractors even more truckloads of money, as would have adequate watering of the site, which they didn’t get right for months?

So far, the only explanation for the watering deficiencies has come from Kofi Bonner, president of Lennar Urban for Northern California, who told the Redevelopment Agency, "Given the hilly terrain, it can only be watered enough so as not to create difficult conditions for the workers going up and down the site."

Lennar didn’t finally start to really control its subcontractors until January, when Lennar ordered Gordon Ball and Luster to "replace two site superintendents with new personnel who must demonstrate environmental sensitivity in conducting their work," according to public records.

MIAMI VICE


Headquartered in Miami Beach, Fla., Lennar began in 1954 as a small home builder, but by 1969 it was developing, owning, and managing commercial and residential real estate. Three years later it became a publicly traded company and has been profitable ever since, spinning off new entities.

Lennar Urban is one such venture. Established in 2003 to focus on military-base reuse, Lennar Urban recently produced a glossy brochure in which it proclaimed, "Military base reuse is our business — this is what we do."

Military-base development may be good business — but it isn’t always such a good deal for cities, particularly when communities don’t end up receiving what was promised on the front end.

In November 2006, Lennar announced it wouldn’t build any rental homes in its 1,600-unit development at the Hunters Point Shipyard. The Redevelopment Agency had originally approved a plan for 700 rental units on the 500-acre site, but Lennar said rising construction costs make rentals a losing investment.

Also in November, Arc Ecology economist Eve Bach warned the Board of Supervisors that Lennar’s public-benefits package for Treasure Island could be seriously compromised.

The package includes 1,800 below-market affordable housing units, 300 acres of parks, open space and recreational amenities, thousands of permanent and construction jobs, green building standards, and innovative transportation.

Bach summed up these proposals as "good concepts, uncertain delivery" and noted the discrepancy between Lennar’s stated desire for a 25 percent return and Budget Analyst Harvey Rose’s conservative prediction of an 18.6 percent return.

"Particularly at risk of shortfalls are transit service levels, very-low-income housing, and open-space maintenance," Bach warned.

With community benefits up in the air, high profits expected, and Lennar’s ability to regulate developers uncertain, many community activists question just what San Francisco is getting from the company.

"I can’t say that Lennar is trustworthy, not when they come up with a community benefits package that has no benefit for the community," activist Marie Harrison said. "I’d like to be able to say that the bulk of our community are going to be homeowners, but I resent that Lennar is spoon-feeding that idea to folks in public housing who want a roof over their heads and don’t want to live with mold and mildew but don’t have jobs or good credit or a down payment. I’ve heard seniors say, ‘I can’t even afford to die.’ Lennar is not being realistic, and that hurts my feelings and breaks my heart."

SHOE-IN


The story of Lennar and Muhammed University of Islam underscores the problems with a system that essentially relies on developers to regulate themselves. Bay Area Air Quality Management District records show officials didn’t know monitoring equipment at the site wasn’t working until August 2006, when Lennar discovered and reported the problem.

Lee reported after an Aug. 31, 2006, meeting with CH2M Hill staff, "They were not confident that the air sampling equipment was sampling correctly, due to faulty records and suspect batteries. CH2M Hill staff discovered depleted batteries and could not determine when they drained."

The air district’s air quality program manager, Janet Glasgow, told the Guardian, "The district had never been in this situation before, in which a developer, Lennar, came in and self-reported that they discovered a problem with their monitoring — something the district would never have been able to determine."

Worrisome as Glasgow’s statement is, there’s also the possibility that CH2M Hill’s failures might never have come to light had it not been for the city’s decision to demand another layer of dust controls. As Department of Public Health engineer Amy Brownell said, her inspectors were witnessing trails of dust firsthand, yet CH2M Hill’s monitors kept registering "non-detect" around asbestos.

"Which was suspicious," Brownell told us, "since they were doing massive earthwork."

Saul Bloom, who is executive director for Arc Ecology, a local nonprofit that helps communities plan for base closures and cleanups, told us he recalls "waiting for the first shoe to drop, wondering how there could be no work stoppages when Lennar was digging up a hillside of serpentinite."

The other shoe did drop shortly after the August 2006 meeting. It was black and well polished and attached to the foot of Muhammed, who began questioning whether the dust wasn’t harming his students.

But Muhammed found his questions weren’t easy to answer, given that Lennar had failed to monitor itself and therefore lacked the data that could have proved no harm was done, a scary situation since health problems from asbestos exposure don’t generally manifest themselves until many years later.

Those questions raised others about Lennar and whether it should be trusted to self-regulate.

D&EACUTE;J&AGRAVE; VU


In December 2006, Redevelopment Agency Commissioner Francee Covington asked Lennar’s environmental manager, Sheila Roebuck, if the company had any asbestos issues at other projects in the nation. Roebuck replied no, not to her knowledge.

But the Guardian has learned that Lennar already had problems with naturally occurring asbestos in El Dorado. The problems concerned dynamiting in hills that were full of naturally occurring asbestos and resulted in a $350,000 settlement in November 2006. The case involved two El Dorado Hills developers, Angelo K. Tsakopoulos and Larry Gualco, and their earthmoving subcontractor, DeSilva Gates Construction of Dublin.

As part of the terms of the settlement, the county agreed, at the behest of the developers, to make their earthmoving contractor, DeSilva Gates, who provided the dynamite, solely responsible for the settlement. Accused of, but not formally charged with, 47 violations of air- and water-pollution laws is West Valley, a limited liability company composed of Lennar Communities of Roseville, Gualco, and Tsakopoulos’s AKT Investments of Sacramento, with Lennar managing the LLC and AKT acting as the investor.

But as the Sacramento Bee‘s Chris Bowman reported, El Dorado Air Quality Management District head Marcella McTaggart expressed her displeasure directly to Lennar Communities, writing, "We are very disappointed to note that the agreed-upon measures to minimize … dust were completely disregarded by your company."

McTaggart’s words bear an eerie resemblance to Bhatia’s comments about how Lennar’s failure to protect the public heath "hurts trust and credibility."

"Ultimately, I’m very interested in being able to talk to the families and children who believe they have been harmed," Bhatia told us. "I want to help with people’s uncertainties and fears."

LEGAL PROBLEMS


Uncertainty and fear were on display at the Redevelopment Agency’s December 2006 meeting when Muhammed claimed that serpentinite, arsenic, and antimony had been found on his students and staff through "resonance testing."

Lung cancer experts doubt that methodology, telling us the only way to detect serpentinite in bodies is by doing an autopsy.

Following the minister’s claims, a rattled Bonner told the Redevelopment Agency, "Lennar cannot continue to be accused of covering something up or willfully poisoning the community because of profits. Lennar is a national public company, and the accusations and allegations are very serious."

Unfortunately for Lennar and the city, the company’s failures to monitor and control dust have left both entities exposed, since they formed a limited liability company without extensive resources, Lennar BVHP, to conduct the shipyard cleanup.

This exposure became even more evident when Muhammed returned to the Redevelopment Agency Commission in January with 15 MUI students in tow to ask for a temporary shutdown of Lennar’s site until a permanent relocation of the school had been worked out.

"It doesn’t seem proper to have peace discussions while the other side is still shooting," Muhammed said.

His relocation request got Bayview–Hunters Point community activist Espanola Jackson raising more questions: "OK, but where are the other residents going? How can you displace them? Have the residents on Kiska Road been notified? Or on Palou? Nope. You give people dollars to do outreach, but they don’t come to my door. Someone is being paid to not give the truth."

Scott Madison, a member of the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee, who’d observed large excavation machines breaking rock but not using water or any other dust controls, said, "I don’t understand how Lennar, who I believe has a sincere interest in doing right, can continue to have a contractor who is out of control."

Bonner explained that Lennar sent notices of default to its subcontractors and hired people from the community to be monitors, plus installed a secondary level of consultants to monitor contractors. But when Redevelopment Agency commissioner London Breed expressed interest in releasing the old contractor and hiring a new one, the agency’s executive director, Marcia Rosen, chimed in.

"Our agreement," Rosen said, "is not with the subcontractor. Our agreement is with Lennar." Her words illustrated the agency’s impotency or unwillingness to crack the whip over Lennar and its subcontractors. But when Lennar Urban vice president Paul Menaker began to explain that its contractors have a 10-day cure period, it was too much for Commissioner Covington.

"We’re way past that," Covington exploded. "We’re not hams!"

EXPLODING HAMS


Perhaps they’re not hams, but the commissioners’ apparent inability to pull the plug on Lennar or its subcontractors leaves observers wondering how best to characterize the relationship between the agency, the city, the community, and Lennar.

Redevelopment Agency commissioners have been appointed either by Mayor Gavin Newsom or his predecessor, the consummate dealmaker Willie Brown. But the incestuous web of political connections goes even further.

Newsom is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s nephew by marriage. Newsom’s campaign treasurer is another Pelosi nephew, Laurence Pelosi, who used to be vice president of acquisitions for Lennar and now works for Morgan Stanley Real Estate, which holds Lennar stock.

Both Newsom and Laurence Pelosi are connected to lobbyist Darius Anderson, who hosted a fundraiser to pay off Newsom’s campaign debts. Anderson counts Lennar as his client for Treasure Island, Mare Island, the Hunters Point Shipyard, and Candlestick Point, another vast swath of land that Lennar controls.

Brown’s ties to the agency and Lennar run equally deep, thanks in part to Lennar’s Bonner, who was Brown’s former head of economic development and before that worked for the Redevelopment Agency, where he recommended hiring KPMG Peat Marwick to choose between Catellus, Lennar, and Forest City for the Hunters Point project.

KPMG acknowledged all three were capable master developers, but the commission decided to go with the most deep-pocketed entity.

Clearly, Lennar plays both sides of the political fence, a reality that suggests it would be wiser for cities to give elected officials such as the Board of Supervisors, not mayoral appointees, the job of controlling developers.

DAMAGE CONTROL


Under the current system, in which Lennar seems accountable to no one except an apparently toothless Redevelopment Agency, you can’t trust Lennar to answer tough questions once it’s already won your military base.

Asked about asbestos at the Hunters Point Shipyard, Bonner directed the Guardian‘s questions to veteran flack Sam Singer, who also handles PR for Ruby Rippey-Tourk. Singer tried to dodge the issue by cherry-picking quotes, beginning with a Dec. 1, 2006, letter that the city’s health director, Dr. Mitch Katz, sent to Redevelopment’s Rosen.

Katz wrote, "I believe that regulatory mechanisms currently in place for Shipyard Redevelopment are appropriate and adequate to protect the public from potential environmental hazards."

The assessment would seem to be at odds with that of Katz’s environmental health director Bhatia, who has been on the frontline of the asbestos fallout and wrote in a Jan. 25 letter, "The failure to secure timely compliance with the regulations by the developer and the repeated violations has also challenged our credibility as a public health agency able and committed to securing the regulatory compliance necessary to protect public health."

Singer also quoted from a Feb. 20 Arc Ecology report on asbestos and dust control for Parcel A, which stated, "Lennar’s responses have been consistently cooperative." But he failed to include Arc’s criticisms of Lennar, namely that its "subcontractors have consistently undermined its compliance requirements," that it has "not exercised sufficient contractual control over its subcontractors so as to ensure compliance," and that it was "overly slow" in implementing an enhanced community air-monitoring system.

Singer focused instead on Arc’s observation that "there is currently no evidence that asbestos from the grading operation on Parcel A poses an endangerment to human health and the environment."

Lack of evidence is not the same as proof, and while Arc’s Saul Bloom doesn’t believe that "asbestos dust is the issue," he does believe that not moving the school, at least temporarily, leaves Lennar and the city liable.

"They formed a partnership, protective measures didn’t happen, the subcontractors continue to be unreliable, and dust in general continues to be a problem," Bloom told us.

Bloom also recommends the Redevelopment Agency have an independent consultant on-site each day and bar contractors who screw up. "Without these teeth, the Redevelopment Agency’s claims that they have enforcement capabilities are like arguments for the existence of God."

Raymond Tompkins, an associate researcher in the Chemistry Department at San Francisco State University and a member of the Remediation Advisory Board to the Navy who has family in Bayview–Hunters Point, says what’s missing from the city’s relationship with Lennar is accountability, independence, and citizen oversight.

"If you can’t put water on dirt so dust doesn’t come up, you can’t deal with the processes at the rest of the shipyard, which are far more complicated," says Tompkins, who doesn’t want the Navy to walk away and believes an industrial hygienist is needed.

"The cavalier attitude around asbestos dust and Lennar at the shipyard fosters the concerns of the African American community that gentrification is taking place — and that, next stop, they are going to be sacrificed for a stadium." *

Sink or swim

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› sarah@sfbg.com


Click to view the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission subsidence map (PDF)

Will rising seas destroy San Francisco’s sewers? Should condos South of Market be on stilts? Could the huge Coca-Cola bottle at the Giants’ ballpark one day bubble with seawater? Can anyone explain why San Francisco still doesn’t have flood insurance?

As temperatures rise, snow packs vanish, and sea levels surge, San Francisco is waking up to its own inconvenient truth: surrounded on three sides by water, paved with concrete throughout, and erecting condo towers faster than you can say "bamboo," the city by the bay is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

With a recent California Climate Change Center report predicting sea levels will rise between four inches and three feet by 2100, San Francisco can expect increased flooding and damage to vital infrastructure and the destruction of fragile ecosystems and low-lying neighborhoods.

The evidence of impending doom is already there.

Addressing a climate change summit last month, Tom Franza, assistant general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, revealed that seawater already tops the city’s weirs for about an hour during very high tides. Franza expects this salt water intrusion, which threatens to kill helpful microbes that digest our solid waste, to get worse as sea levels continue to rise.

So what steps is the city taking to combat climate change?

The SFPUC is already building safety valves on floodgates and pushing for environmentally friendly development toward a future where green roofs, grassy swales, and permeable sidewalks will help stop rainwater from inundating already stressed sewers. It’s also working with the Departments of Planning and Public Works to map blocks and lots that are already sinking — known officially as subsidence — and therefore especially vulnerable to flooding from rising seas.

It comes as a shock to learn that the Planning Department doesn’t already have maps of areas that are prone to floods, but zoning administrator Larry Badiner told the Guardian, "In the past, floods were related to free-running streams, and since there aren’t any in San Francisco anymore, it wasn’t an issue."

Senior planner Craig Nikitas did confirm for us that city planners are working with the SFPUC and the DPW to flag blocks and lots prone to sinking, a phenomenon associated with rising seas that city officials don’t quite understand.

"If I had to guess, I’d say [they’re sinking] because most are on sandy soils or fill and over time there’s been a settling of sand or because of subterranean flooding," Nikitas said.

As the city’s subsidence map shows, the problem is biggest in SoMa and along the bay — where concrete-intense development is on the rise.

In the future, Nikitas told us, "If a developer comes in to do something in those areas, the system will flag it, and builders should pay extra attention to drainage and elevation, using raised entrances three steps up from the street and trench drains and installing sump pumps if there’s a subterranean garage."

As small a step as subsidence mapping sounds, it’s a sea change for city planners. SFPUC principal engineer Jon Loiacono recalls how in the past he was trained to say, "If flooding happens on your property, it’s your problem."

Loiacono remembers only one instance when the SFPUC built a pump station in response to a developer’s concerns. That was almost a decade ago.

Advising developers about the perils of building in flood-prone areas sounds obvious, but with that step comes responsibility that threatens to drown the city fiscally. Asked who’ll pay for flood damage, Loiacono pointed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"FEMA is currently mapping San Francisco, but the city would have to join FEMA’s flood insurance program to get coverage," Loiacono said.

Surprised that the city doesn’t already belong, the Guardian called FEMA’s Oakland-based spokesperson, Frank Mansell, who revealed San Francisco is the only city in the Bay Area that isn’t part of FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Participating in the FEMA mapping program would allow residents to qualify for federally subsidized flood insurance and get rebuilding grants after a disaster. FEMA’s Henry Chau says San Francisco will have to raise its standards "slightly higher" to join the agency’s flood insurance program.

Noting that FEMA’s San Francisco map is due this summer and includes development that lies in the city’s floodplains — development FEMA strongly discourages — Mansell said he doesn’t know why San Francisco doesn’t belong. But he does know cities that do must build to code and enact ordinances to ensure people aren’t living in flood zones. He said cities that do build in flood zones must take preventive steps such as raising buildings.

"If cities don’t comply with FEMA’s requirements, they’re put on notice and could be removed from the flood insurance program," Mansell said, adding that disasters such as Hurricane Katrina illustrate why private brokers won’t sell flood insurance.

But as FEMA digitizes and puts its maps online and predicts that 92 percent of US residents will belong to the NFIP by 2010, not everyone is singing its praises. San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission executive director Will Travis faults FEMA’s flood maps for not factoring in climate change.

"Instead, FEMA looks to the past to determine floodplains. As a result, their maps are inadequate and show less inundation than is already occurring," Travis told us. The BCDC just released maps that show a two-meter sea level rise in the bay that would put the San Francisco and Oakland airports and the Giants stadium underwater.

"But we won’t allow the Giants’ ballpark to flood, SFO to be underwater, and San Francisco to become Venice," Travis said. "Instead, sea walls and levees will be built. It’ll require more investment in infrastructure and shoreline protections. The point of the maps is to show people what could happen and get them to take action. Sea level rise doesn’t belong in the realms of science fiction. It’s happening now."

With the California Climate Change Center reporting a seven-inch rise in the bay since 1900 — and the feds refusing to address the role of carbon emissions in climate change — Travis predicted that insurance companies will have the biggest impact in land use planning.

"There’s always an effort to shift costs from the private to the public sector, and from there, from the local to the state to the federal government," Travis told us. "But insurance companies are looking at potential huge losses and won’t be offering policies at all, or offering them at very high prices."

Mansell defended FEMA’s flood maps, arguing that they’re used primarily for insurance and so can’t be used for forecasting.

"We look at existing data," Mansell said. "Otherwise everyone’s premiums would be unpredictable and probably high. FEMA does encourage communities to build to the highest standard, which means the 100-year flood event that has a 1 percent chance of occurring. And FEMA doesn’t conduct the studies. The Army Corps of Engineers does."

Army Corps spokesperson Maria Or confirmed that her agency collects data at different times of the year — data showing the climate has been changing and helping forecast what those changes will mean.

"But we can’t base maps on pure speculation," Or told us. "We continuously look at new data and reanalyze the situation based on that new information. The more relevant question is how often a FEMA map is updated."

Mansell said it takes FEMA one to two years to create a flood map, using computer models, precipitation and tidal patterns, rivers and stream flows — and tracking how much concrete is laid down in an area and how much is built in a floodplain.

"Areas are mapped and remapped and show three levels of risk — low, moderate, and high risk," he said. Based on these ratings, FEMA reviews flood insurance premiums once a year.

But with FEMA the main hope of covering sea rise–related flood damage, experts such as Dr. Peter Gleick of the Oakland-based Pacific Research Institute join the BCDC’s Travis in accusing FEMA of having "failed miserably in integrating climate change into its planning."

"BCDC included climate change in their maps. FEMA did not. Why aren’t there flood maps everywhere around the country that integrate climate change?" asked Gleick, who produced a map 17 years ago showing the impact of a one-meter sea level rise on the bay.

"It’s a little depressing to have been working for two decades on this," Gleick conceded. "I’m glad people are starting to pay more attention and accept that sea level is going up, because the impacts will depend on how we react and how quickly, but we’re decades too late to prevent bad things from happening."

Outraged by President George W. Bush’s we-can’t-afford-to-unilaterally-cut-greenhouse-gases argument, Gleick said, "They’re putting short-term economic gain ahead of long-term survival." But he praised California for establishing a cap to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

In light of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that suggests a 10- to 20-foot sea level increase in the next 1,000 years, Gleick observed, "That means hundreds and millions of people will be potential refugees. So we better reduce our greenhouse gases starting now. We can’t prevent some change, but we hope to prevent disastrous sea level change."

Gleick said he’s worried that we won’t protect low-income areas or move fast enough to prevent damage, a shortcoming that will also have devastating environmental impacts.

"Marshes and wetlands have no place to retreat, since the areas around them are already built up," he explained. "Bay Area communities should make parks, bay and coastal trails, and wetlands bigger, so they’ll have greater protection 50 years from now. And if you’re developing a building that’s supposed to last for 50 years, you need to design it now for the changes that are to come." *

The benefits of fiber

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Amsterdam is building a citywide fiber-to-the-premises system. So are Hong Kong, Milan, and Zurich. If San Francisco follows suit, it would be making a far-sighted, multifaceted investment: FTTP would boost our economy, attracting software companies, video production houses, and digital media shops. It would enhance public health, allowing surgeons to review the same materials from different locations. Municipal fiber would improve public safety, facilitating the mirroring and backup of vital data at remote, earthquake-safe locations. It would enable unlimited and open communications — breaking ongoing communication monopolies — and save buckets of cash within a couple of decades.

These futuristic findings are laid out in the fiber feasibility report Sup. Tom Ammiano commissioned two years ago, but the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services didn’t green-light it until last fall. As a result of this delay, the city’s Maryland-based consultant, Columbia Telecommunications Corp. (CTC), couldn’t complete its fiber study until after Mayor Gavin Newsom said he’d struck a wi-fi deal with the Google-EarthLink partnership that still requires the Board of Supervisors’ approval.

Newsom’s plan was threatened even before his recent scandals. City budget analyst Harvey Rose’s report on municipal wi-fi offered a scathing assessment of the Google-EarthLink deal. Board members will now weigh the two new reports — and the opinions of a growing number of critics of the deal — before deciding on the mayor’s wi-fi proposal.

"So far I have more questions than answers," Sup. Aaron Peskin said of trying to digest the budget analyst’s report. "Questions about free service and quality of service. Questions about the environmental and aesthetic impacts of installing antennas citywide. I’ve got questions about Google’s cooperation with a totalitarian government overseas. I’ve got questions reutf8g to the shitty service I’ve personally gotten from EarthLink. Questions about the municipalization of services and questions about other technologies, including fiber."

Peskin admitted he’s yet to read the fiber report, which lauds FTTP as "the holy grail of broadband" while explaining that wi-fi isn’t a competitor but a complement to fiber, since wi-fi’s key advantage is its "mobility and connectivity during movement."

That said, the report recommends building citywide fiber, which it describes as a "fat pipe all the way into the home or business." In the face of the public sector’s lack of interest in building fiber networks that would meet growing demands for bandwidth and speed in an equitable and affordable manner, the CTC report concludes that municipal fiber would rank San Francisco among the world’s most far-sighted cities "by creating an infrastructure asset with a lifetime of decades that is almost endlessly upgradeable and capable of supporting any number of public or private sector communications initiatives."

With fiber allowing numerous competitors to quickly and inexpensively enter the market and offer competing, differentiated broadband services and access, the report recommends a wholesale open-access model to facilitate "democratic and free market values" and enhance the city’s reputation "for visionary and pioneering projects."

The report estimates a citywide open-access wholesale model will cost $563 million but predicts it will spark economic investment and jobs. It recommends building a pilot network in a 12-square-mile economic development area that includes Bayview, Hunters Point, South Bayshore, Chinatown, the Mission District, Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, SoMa, the Tenderloin, and the Western Addition.

The study also observes that aside from supporting safety and communications systems (thereby saving the city huge and unending costs of leasing circuits from telephone companies) and providing higher quality, higher capacity, more reliable, securer service, fiber is the best backbone for wi-fi systems.

Or as communications activist Bruce Wolfe recently told the Guardian, "Wi-fi is a parasite looking for a wire."

Speaking to us, along with United Layer’s Tim Pozar, SFLan’s Ralf Muehlen, and Our City’s Eric Brooks, Wolfe stated that far from being "the naysayers, as we were accused after critiquing the Google-EarthLink deal, we’re actually the truthsayers."

The foursome, who are supporters and providers of current wi-fi services in San Francisco, said although wi-fi rocks when you’re at an outdoor café or checking bus schedules with a cell phone, fiber rules when you’re in a basement, on a fourth floor, or in need of reliable and efficient service or massive capacity.

"That’s why it makes more sense to roll out a joint fiber-cable-wi-fi system, because all the interference and bog downs would be solved by hooking antennas into fiber," Pozar says. "Putting a bunch of antennas up as a cloud over the city supposedly gives free users speeds of 300 kbps, but anyone making a phone call or downloading a video will drain everyone else’s speeds, and blanketing the city with transmitters will make the spectrum unusable by others."

Muehlen expects the wi-fi service his business provides to get "blown out of the ether, technically, or be severely compromised," by the proposed Google-EarthLink deal. "But I wouldn’t mind if I got a network that didn’t suck," he says. "I just want something that works."

Brooks said many people who can’t afford the Internet are "compartmentalized in lower-income areas. Why not begin by addressing those areas instead of giving away the whole 49 square miles to Google-EarthLink?"

He noted that it will cost Google-EarthLink an estimated $300,000 to pay into the city-run Digital Inclusionary Fund. "That’s a drop in the bucket in terms of providing residents with gear, training, and support that truly bridge the digital divide." *

The wi-fi elephant

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› sarah@sfbg.com

It’s been widely reported in recent weeks that San Francisco and the Google-EarthLink team have already reached a deal to offer free wireless Internet service citywide. In reality, the deal cut by Mayor Gavin Newsom is tentative and requires the approval of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and the Board of Supervisors.

And getting that approval looks increasingly unlikely in light of a growing chorus of critics and a scathing assessment of the plan that Board of Supervisors budget analyst Harvey Rose laid out in his Jan. 11 report on the feasibility of a municipally owned wi-fi system.

As Rose notes, even though the city’s technology consultant, Civitium, recommended that officials examine all alternative approaches to bridging the digital divide, the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) negotiated with Google-EarthLink "without conducting a more formal analysis of the feasibility of wireless broadband or a completed study of the feasibility of wired networks."

That study of various options, including a municipal broadband system using fiber, was requested by the Board of Supervisors on Oct. 5, 2004, before Newsom pitched his free wi-fi idea in his State of the City speech two weeks later. The DTIS and the SFPUC staff decided to fast-track Newsom’s plan; the fiber study began in June 2006 and is expected from Columbia Telecommunications Corp. (CTC) any day now.

Rose’s report questions why the city wasn’t studying all its options before going with the Google-EarthLink wi-fi system, which the mayor is pushing. Supervisors have now announced plans to study various digital options in board committee meetings and at the Local Agency Formation Commission before making any decisions.

All of this doesn’t bode well for Newsom because, according to Rose, the Google-EarthLink deal gives the two telecommunications giants potentially unfair business advantages, delivers San Francisco a technically flawed system, and leaves gaping holes in Newsom’s much-ballyhooed attempt to bridge the digital divide.

Rose’s not-so-rosy report reveals that EarthLink’s wireless network limits potential competition in the unlicensed radio frequency band, giving the company a quasi-exclusive franchise, "as any competitors would have to contend with EarthLink’s existing wireless signals."

The deal also gives EarthLink the appearance of a conflict of interest, because the company serves as wholesale network provider and one of the available Internet service providers.

The report warns that the plan’s sale and usage of user data for private purposes "exposes those utilizing the EarthLink wireless network to the wide dissemination of their personal data, even if such users opt out of the receipt of marketing materials." Rose also notes that Google gets exclusive access to users of EarthLink’s basic service — a setup that gives the telecommunications giant free access to millions of points of data, all in return for a free but slow service.

Perhaps most damning for Newsom, given the mayor’s repeated claims that the deal is all about helping the underserved, is Rose’s observation that the basic free service provided by EarthLink will be slower than existing DSL and cable Internet technology.

Rose writes, "To receive service roughly comparable to existing technology and similar networks being implemented in other cities, network users would have to pay an estimated monthly fee of $21.95, while 3,200 network users who qualify under a proposed ‘Digital Inclusion Product’ would pay a monthly fee of $12.95."

In the face of all these drawbacks, Rose recommends the board tell the city to reissue a request for proposals to allow for consideration of publicly owned, public-private, and privately owned systems — the three wireless models Rose contrasts in his 42-page report. While Rose concludes that it may be fiscally feasible to build municipally owned wi-fi, he notes the city would likely face competition from private interests and risk network obsolescence within a few years.

Rose suggests future proposals should provide wi-fi access for low-income residents that is "high-quality and free," including "state-of-the art connectivity that is at least equal in technological capability to nearby offerings," and "try to leverage existing public and private infrastructures." He also recommends such proposals include, to the extent practicable, the city’s existing fiber infrastructure — and incorporate results of Civitium’s and the CTC’s studies.

"Google-EarthLink only seems to be there to sell the advertising and collect the fees," Sup. Jake McGoldrick told the Guardian, as he vented frustration over how the Mayor’s Office and the DTIS focused exclusively on the Google-EarthLink deal.

"Every time they were asked for information that would advance other options, they stonewalled," McGoldrick said.

DTIS chief administrator Ron Vinson told the Guardian he hasn’t seen the fiber study, which was expected at the start of the year. "It’s not out yet. We haven’t seen it," Vinson said Jan. 19, the day after Newsom told the Chronicle that the wi-fi deal was too important to be killed off by politics.

But as wi-fi activist Bruce Wolfe told the Guardian, "It’s the mayor’s introduction of an insufficient plan that’s causing the situation to become political, when really it’s a technical question."

Fiber is a more reliable and faster technology than wi-fi, and it serves as a better backhaul to a wi-fi system than the phone lines that Google-EarthLink plans to use. Wolfe said the deal is "like buying diesel buses when everyone’s converting to hybrids."

He said San Francisco’s hilly, foggy, and built-out terrain means residents will get spotty wi-fi at best and no wi-fi at worst, particularly if they’re not within sight of a wi-fi node or on the third floor of a high-rise. Wolfe recommends that the city combine its preexisting fiber backbone and short-term contracts with groups of wi-fi providers to create a series of neighborhood access points, all managed by a nonprofit agency with technological expertise.

"If Google owned the city and needed to provide access to us, it wouldn’t go for a wi-fi-only solution," Wolfe said. "This is no time to be building a white elephant." *

How to Make a Pigeon Burrito

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By Sarah Phelan No, this isn’t my secret recipe for surviving life in the city on a tight budget. Instead, this is my not-so-secret recipe for helping get wild birds out of spaces they’d rather not be in—like trapped in the bay window of Farley’s coffee house on Potrero Hill, which is what happened last week when I was having lunch in the famed establishment and a pigeon flew through the door, then tried to escape, but hit the window, instead. Understandably, everyone panicked at the sight of a pigeon flying into a window. People screamed, customers ducked and it looked like things could rapidly turn nasty, especially for the pigeon. At which point I surprised even myself by standing up, picking up my ratty old black jacket which was hanging on the back of my chair, instructing those sitting in the bay window to “Move!” and swiftly throwing ratty jacket over the bird so it was completely engulfed. Immediately, the bird stopped moving, and I was able to roll it up, in one gentle move, thereby transforming bird and coat into a pigeon burrito, in which the bird was the filler and the coat was the soft shell. With the bird firmly secured, I walked to door, opened my coat and, the bird immediately spread its wings and flew up and away, over the rooftops of Potrero Hill and towards the Bay, like my soul escaping its body. To my embarrassment, everyone clapped and a man who was sitting on the bench that wraps around the tree outside Farley’s shouted, “You’re a hero!” So, next time you see a bird trapped, surprise yourself by stripping off your coat, sweater, shirt, or whatev, and making a bird burrito. You’ll be glad you did.

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