Steven T. Jones Archives — Page 21 of 76 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Mayor and Mirkarimi testify in Ethics probe before dramatic disruption

Sasha Cuttler

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June 29, 2012

Mayor and Mirkarimi testify in Ethics probe before dramatic disruption

After Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi endured about four hours of questioning in his official misconduct proceedings, mostly from Deputy City Attorney Peter Keith, Mayor Ed Lee took the stand a little after 1pm. But just as Mirkarimi attorney Shepherd Kopp was beginning to pin Lee down on the selective manner in which he decided to launch these unprecedented proceedings, the commission suddenly announced the hearing was being suspended and the room would need to be cleared immediately.

There is speculation that there was a bomb threat or other security emergency, but officials have so far offered no explanation for the dramatic development or whether the hearing would reconvene today. Yet the room is still half-filled with journalists and audience members, some speculating that that the clearing of the room was simply an effort to get the unusually grim-faced Lee off the hot seat.

Kopp’s questioning included pointed questions about whether he consulted any members of the Board of Supervisors before deciding to bring official misconduct charges against Mirkarimi in March. The city’s objection was overruled after Kopp noted that the supervisors will ultimately decide Mirkarimi’s fate. Forced to answer under oath, Lee said no, he didn’t speak to any supervisors before filing charges.

But progressive activist Debra Walker says Sup. Christina Olague — women who are close political allies and speak regularly — has repeatedly told her that Mayor Lee asked her opinion before filing the charges. If true, that would mean Mayor Lee committed perjury, which is a felony. Yet as reporters confronted Olague outside her office, she denied ever speaking with Lee about the case and then barricaded herself in her office.

When the reporters lingered and persisted, she finally emerged, reiterated her denial, refused to speculate about why her friend Walker would make that claim, and said, “We’re not allowed to discuss this matter with anyone before it comes to the board…I may have to recuse myself from voting on this.”

It was unclear why she thought recusal might be necessary, but if she does that would hurt Lee’s effort to get the nine votes on the board needed to remove Mirkarimi.

We’ll have complete analysis of the testimony and other developments in next week’s Guardian.

CPMC’s new numbers threaten St. Luke’s and the mayor’s deal

Sasha Cuttler

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June 27, 2012

9

Can San Franciscans trust California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) not to shutter St. Luke’s Hospital once the company gets what it wants from the city? And has the Mayor’s Office, in its desire to please the business community and building trades, accepted and promoted a bad deal that doesn’t adequately protect the city’s interests?

Those are some of the questions that arose Monday during a hearing on CPMC’s $2.5 billion, multi-hospital development proposal before the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee when officials from the Mayor’s Office revealed that the development agreement they negotiated with CPMC might not be good enough to keep St. Luke’s open.

As we’ve reported, CPMC (a subsidiary of Sutter Health, a not-for-profit corporation that nonetheless has a well-earned reputation for profiteering and other bad corporate behavior) is seeking to build a 550-bed regional luxury hospital atop Cathedral Hill. In exchange, the development deal requires CPMC to rebuild St. Luke’s, a seismically unsafe hospital in the Mission District that is relied on by many low-income San Franciscans (as well as the city, which would otherwise have to shoulder more of that burden at General Hospital).

After years of stalled negotiations between CPMC and two consecutive mayors, Mayor Ed Lee announced a deal in March that would have CPMC build a smaller version of St. Luke’s (with just 80 beds) and agree to keep it open for at least 20 years as long as CPMC’s operating margins didn’t dip below 1 percent in two consecutive years.

Activists had criticized the deal as too small, too short, and without enough guarantees, but Mayor’s Office officials have consistently said they were confident it was enough to keep St. Luke’s from being shuttered. But now, based on new revenue projections offered by CPMC, even those officials have lost confidence in the deal and say it needs to be renegotiated.

“These new 2012 projections, while still showing CPMC will not breach the 1 percent margin, do not offer the same comfort level we previously had,” Ken Rich of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development told the committee.

The news hit like a bombshell, shaking the confidence of even supervisors who strongly supported the deal, such as Sup. Scott Wiener, who called it a “surprising, critical piece of information” and said, “It’s very, very important that this issue is quickly resolved.”

For supervisors who were already skeptical of the deal and CPMC – such as Sup. David Campos, whose District 9 includes St. Luke’s – it was further evidence that this was a bad deal that needed more work before being brought to the board. The Planning Commission has already approved the project and the full board was scheduled to consider it in just a few weeks.

“What does that say about the way the negotiation was done?” Campos told us. “How half-baked can something be? What have we done to verify the numbers that CPMC gave us? And what does this say about CPMC?…If the numbers on St. Luke’s aren’t accurate, how can we trust the rest of what they’re telling us?”

Yet during the hearing, when Campos tried to get reassurances from CPMC officials and requested that the board be allowed to review the company’s financial records, he was rebuffed and belittled by CPMC attorney Pam Duffy – who later tersely apologized for her comments after Committee Chair Eric Mar criticized them as “insulting to the board.”

Campos had questioned Rich about why the city was relying on CPMC rather than independently assessing the numbers. “Maybe if you had done an audit, you wouldn’t be in this position of being surprised by the numbers that were given to you,” Campos told Rich.

But Rich said “projections are guesses, we can’t ever guarantee that they are right,” noting that CPMC had revised its revenue estimates downward for the years after St. Luke’s would open (when it would be absorbing the high costs of construction), making its profit margin slimmer. “CPMC took a more conservative approach to forecasting the rate of increase in hospital charges as well as patient volumes in light of the greater uncertainty in health care finance,” Rich said.

So Campos asked whether the supervisors could review CPMC’s data. Rich, who has reviewed it, replied, “The conditions under which we were shown CPMC’s projections is that those are confidential.”

Campos noted that it is the board’s job to review and approval this deal to determine whether it’s in the city’s best interests, which shouldn’t simply involve trusting CPMC. “Why should the executive branch of the government see those numbers but not the legislative branch?” he asked.
“It’s really not our call,” said Rich, noting that he had no objections to the request.

But when Campos asked CPMC’s Duffy, she offered a legalistic refusal, and when Campos tried to explain his reasoning, she said, “I heard your speech a moment ago” and added, “this isn’t really a game of gotcha.”

When Campos said the board was simply exercising its due diligence over an important project. she said “nothing unusual or untoward has occurred here, and the suggestion that might be the case, I think it unfair.”

But Campos wasn’t alone in wanting more reassurance from CPMC, who supervisors, labor leaders, and community activists have criticized for its secrecy and bad faith negotiating tactics with both the city and its employee unions.

“This announcement is shocking, on a number of levels,” Board President David Chiu said at the hearing, noting that he had met with CPMC officials just days earlier and they hadn’t mentioned the new developments, instead assuring him that their operating margins were high and the deal protected St. Luke’s. “It’s not a great way to build the trust we’ll need to move this forward.”

Rich said he had learned of the new numbers 12 days earlier, drawing a rebuke from Campos and others who said the supervisors should have been notified earlier. But Rich said that he was hoping that the problem would be solved through negotiations with CPMC before the hearing, but that talks over the issue have so far been fruitless.

“We would have vastly preferred to have an agreement in hand,” Rich told the committee, reassuring the supervisors that the Mayor’s Office will not support the project until the St. Luke’s issue is resolved to its satisfaction.

But Sup. Malia Cohen criticized CPMC as an untrustworthy negotiating partner. “CPMC has an interesting corporate culture,” she said, noting that the company has repeatedly misled supervisors and community leaders, accusing it of being “disingenuous in its negotiations.”

Chiu emphasized that this is a make-or-break issue: “This is an escape clause that could allow St. Luke’s – and what St. Luke’s means to the city – to not be operational. So this is an incredibly important question.”

Campos said this latest episode only added to his suspicion that CPMC will play games with its finances to shutter St. Luke’s – whose construction must be completed before CPMC can build Cathedral Hill Hospital – once it gets the lucrative regional medical center that it really wants.

“How do we know they aren’t transferring money out of CPMC into Sutter in order to shut down St. Luke’s?” Campos said, adding that he wants to see a clear guarantee that St. Luke’s will remain open as a full-service hospital. “This deal, as far as I’m concerned, is not ready for prime time.”

Mayor vs. Mirkarimi

Andrew Lam

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June 26, 2012

58

steve@sfbg.com

For all the lawyers, investigators, witnesses, politicians, and political appointees involved in Mayor Ed Lee’s official misconduct case against suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, this case is ultimately a battle between these two politicians, who come from rival ideological camps — and have a lot riding on the outcome of their clash.

And this week, both Mirkarimi and Lee are expected to take the witness stand and face tough questioning from each other’s attorneys.

These first two rounds of live testimony before the Ethics Commission — which has been painstakingly setting up procedures for its inquiry, defining its scope, and making myriad rulings on what evidence and witnesses to allow — could be the emotional high point of hearings likely to drag on throughout the summer.

On June 28, after the commission finishes ruling on the admissibility of evidence — dealing mostly with the controversial testimony of Lee’s star witness, Ivory Madison, the neighbor who triggered the police investigation that found Mirkarimi had grabbed his wife’s arm during a Dec. 31 argument — Mirkarimi is expected to take the stand.

Given the tacks taken by each side so far, the deputy city attorneys representing Lee will likely try to ask Mirkarimi a broad array of questions about his actions and their wider implications, while his attorneys will seek to limit the line of inquiry to what they see as the narrow question of whether he committed specific acts of official misconduct.

“They’re going to want to blast him with every single issue they can conjure up,” said Mirkarimi attorney Shepherd Kopp. But he thinks the Ethics Commission “will limit it consistent with how they’ve been ruling on our objections,” which has already greatly limited the case that Lee sought to present.

The next day, Lee is scheduled to take the stand, with Mirkarimi’s attorneys planning to question the mayor about why he didn’t conduct an investigation or seek more input from witnesses or former mayors before demanding Mirkarimi’s resignation and suspending him without pay in March.

“The suspension was not done carefully with the best interests of the city at heart. It was a rash political decision that had little to do with the facts,” Mirkarimi’s other attorney, David Waggoner, told us.

Indeed, the city didn’t begin gathering evidence until after the charges had been filed, and since then Lee and his team haven’t been able to unearth much evidence in support of his most damning allegations that Mirkarimi tried to dissuade witnesses and thwart the police investigation, something that Mirkarimi and his attorneys have adamantly denied. In the absence of that evidence, Waggoner said Lee has stepped up his efforts to defame Mirkarimi publicly.

Lee told reporters on June 19 that he suspended Mirkarimi because he was “beating his wife,” seeming to escalate the characterization of a single arm-grabbing incident. The city has also released the video that Madison made of Mirkarimi’s wife tearfully recounting the incident and the couple’s text messages, which made Mirkarimi look bad but don’t offer much new information or evidence.

“He’s panicking. The ship is going down and he’s beginning to flail,” Waggoner said of Lee’s recent statements and actions. “The more the mayor uses that kind of rhetoric, the less credibility he has.”

We sought responses and comments from the press secretaries for Lee and the City Attorney’s Office, but both refused to comment for the record.

Ethics Commission Chair Benedict Hur has taken an increasingly strong role in running the hearings and limiting the ability of either side’s attorney to control them. At the June 19 hearing, he cut off Deputy City Attorney Sherri Kaiser at least twice when she tried to offer unsolicited comments, at one point causing her to get visibly agitated and declare, “I’m objecting to the procedures for objecting to evidence.”

But Hur didn’t relent or modify his approach, telling her, “We are trying to conduct these proceedings in a fair and expeditious way.” Waggoner praised the way Hur has run the hearings so far: “I think he’s been fair in his rulings and how he’s conducted the process.”

After this week’s pair of hearings, the Ethics Commission is scheduled to reconvene its inquiry on July 18 and 19, when it will likely hear from Madison, whose testimony could make or break the case. But first, attorneys for each side are meeting this week to decide where they can agree to limit Madison’s testimony, with the commission making rulings on realms where the two sides differ. Deputy City Attorney Peter Keith has previously said he expects Madison to face tough questioning in which her credibility will be attacked, but the commission itself has already criticized her written declaration and greatly limited her hearsay accounts of life in the Mirkarimi household (see “Ethics Commission undercuts the main witness against Mirkarimi,” June 20, SFBG.com Politics blog). And Kopp told us, “If I get most of my objections sustained, I may not need to cross examine her, as fun as that might be.”

Conservative attitudes cost California, but the kids are on the case

Sasha Cuttler

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June 26, 2012

57

Conservative attitudes cost California, but the kids are on the case

I hope you’ll all indulge me a proud papa moment, because it’s one that also has important public policy implications for California as state officials and voters wrestle with serious budget problems and a severely overcrowded prison system against the backdrop of conservative interests wielding more political and fiscal power than their numbers should indicate.

My oldest daughter, Breanna Jones, last week graduated with honors from Stanford University with a degree in public policy. At the ceremony, she received an award for her honors thesis – “California’s Tragedy of the Commons: How a Few Voters Disproportionately Influence County Use of State Prisons” – which I’m attaching as a PDF.

“California’s prison system has overrun maximum capacity, causing a public health conundrum, constitutional violations, and hemorrhaging finances. Even the public – which overwhelmingly endorsed past ‘tough-on-crime’ policies – has expressed its outrage about this waste of tax dollars. Recently, new research revealed that some California counties incarcerate more prisoners than the crime rate should dictate. That ‘surplus incarceration’ disproportionately contributes to the prison problem and thereby poses a significant tax burden on the state,” her report’s abstract begins.

Her research isolated a multitude of variables to show how it is the decisions that district attorneys in conservative counties make in how they charge crimes – with those prosecutors becoming especially aggressive after closely contested district attorneys races – that has the biggest impact on these high incarceration rates.

In other words, conservative attitudes toward crime and criminals are causing these usually small counties to have big impacts on the state’s prison budget – not to mention being unfair to those being sent to prison – something that ought to concern all of us.

Couple this with other studies showing that conservative counties also tend to use a disproportionate share of other state resources – and with the requirement of a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to raise taxes, which Democrats fall just a couple votes short of – and it becomes clear that these right-wing political attitudes aren’t benign. Indeed, we’re all suffering from the outsized influence of a vocal minority of state residents.

Luckily, voters will have some opportunities to correct this imbalance in November when there will be revenue measures that need only a simply minority to be approved, as well as measures that would repeal the death penalty and reform the Three Strikes You’re Out law, approval of which would begin to undo some of the damage done by these tight-fisted hypocrites.

California has lost its way and its balance. Luckily, the younger generation understands the situation and is willing to help us clean up the messes we’ve created for ourselves. It is the only thing that gives me hope for the future.

Olague is the swing vote on voting system repeal

Sasha Cuttler

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June 25, 2012

58

Olague is the swing vote on voting system repeal

Conservative Sup. Mark Farrell’s effort to repeal San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system for citywide elected officials is headed to the Board of Supervisors tomorrow, and all eyes are on swing vote Sup. Christina Olague. She surprised her longtime progressive allies with her early co-sponsorship of the measure when it was introduced in March, but she’s now expressing doubts about the measure.

The board rejected an earlier effort by Farrell and Sup. Sean Elsbernd to repeal RCV outright, but then Farrell tried again with a measure that excludes supervisorial elections and has a primary election in September, and if nobody gets 65 percent of the vote then the two two finishers have a runoff in November.

“I’m not going to support something that calls for a runoff in September,” Olague told the Guardian, referring to the primary election, although she did echo the concerns from RCV’s critics who claim that it confuses voters. She also said that it hasn’t helped elect more progressives and that “some progressives I talked to aren’t 100 percent behind it.”

Such talk worries Steven Hill, the activist who helped create the voter-approved system, and who has been battling to shore up support for it in the face of concerted attacks by more conservative politicians, newspaper columnists, and downtown interests, all of whom preferred the old system of low-turnout, big-money December runoff elections.

“I think it’s working well. San Francisco saves a ton of money by not having two elections,” Hill said. He said downtown money will skew the runoffs elections even more in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizen United ruling allowing unlimited political spending. “With Citizen’s United,” he said, “they’ll just do a ton of independent expenditures.”

He said Olague had told him she intended to withdraw her co-sponsorship of the measure, but she hadn’t done so yet. Olague told us that she wanted to discuss the matter with Farrell before withdrawing her support, that she hasn’t been able to reach him yet, and that she’s been focused on other issues she considers more important, such as crime prevention.

The measure currently is being co-sponsored by the board’s five most conservative supervisors and Olague, meaning it will go before voters on the November ballot if they all remain supportive. Hill said that the measure may not be voted on tomorrow because of an administrative snafu dealing with noticing requirements, but the hearing would proceed anyway, possibly offering clues as to the measure’s chances of success.

Dueling pot protests precede rejection of a permit appeal

Sasha Cuttler

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June 21, 2012

12

Dueling pot protests precede rejection of a permit appeal

Dueling demonstrations in front of City Hall yesterday afternoon – with one side supporting medical marijuana dispensaries and the other protesting the city’s February approval of three new clubs in the Outer Mission/Excelsior area – preceded the Board of Permit Appeals decision to reject an appeal challenging Mission Organics.

That was the first of the three clubs to pull their building permits to open up shop in a part of the city that currently has no cannabis dispensaries. Yet a group of residents from the region – which includes District 11 supervisorial candidate Leon Chow – has been angrily agitating against the clubs and claiming they expose children to an illegal drug.

Bearing signs that included “Stay away from pot clubs” and “Keep the weeds away from kids” – most in both English and Chinese characters, with a smattering of Spanish translations – the predominantly Asian protesters squared off against a slightly larger crowd of medical marijuana supporters bearing signs that included “Respect Local Law” and “Marijuana is Medicine.” Together, it was a crowd of a couple hundred lining the sidewalk, drawing reactions from passing motorists.

Asked whether he would try to undermine the city’s system of regulating medical marijuana facilities if elected to the Board of Supervisors, Chow told us, “We’re opposing this, but I don’t think it would be my priority.”

Chow said he was “opposing high density,” noting that the Planning Commission approved three dispensaries in the area on Feb. 21, but he also raised concerns that the clubs make it easier for children to get marijuana, that they cater to healthy people just looking to get high, and that city regulations conflict with federal law.

“We don’t want healthy young people to be exposed to people coming out of medical marijuana clubs,” Chow told us. Asked whether he had similar concerns about bars and liquor stores, he said that he did but “there’s nothing I can do” to shut down existing businesses that sell alcohol.

“I don’t want there to be more liquor stores,” he said, although he assured us that, “I’m not a conservative, crazy, church-going Republican.”

Yet supporters of Mission Organics – whose workers will be represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union – did call Chow a hypocrite given that he works for SEIU-UHW. “So it’s a union representative opposing a union business,” said Matt Witemyre, an organizer with UFCW who was demonstrating in support of Mission Organics, which he said has agreed to a strict code of conduct that will make them good, responsible members of that community.

“The vast majority of the neighborhood is in support of the project,” Ariel Clark, an attorney representing Mission Organics, told us, characterizing protesters as a small yet vocal part of the neighborhood. The appeal was filed by Steve Currier, president of the Outer Mission Merchants and Residents Association.

Long after most of the protesters on both sides had gone home, the Board of Permit Appeals voted 3-1 to reject the appeal, clearing the way for Mission Organics to open on the 5200 block of Mission Street. But opponents have vowed to continue their fight and appeal the permits for the other two approved clubs – Tree-Med and The Green Cross, a venerable cannabis delivery service – when they apply for building permits.

Avalos emerges as the board’s main progressive champion

Sasha Cuttler

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June 20, 2012

23

Avalos emerges as the board’s main progressive champion

Sup. John Avalos seems to be the only consistent champion of progressive values at the Board of Supervisors these days, as he demonstrated once again yesterday as he tried to present some alternatives to the neoliberal corporatism that has seized City Hall over the last couple years.

Last week, Avalos was the only vote against a pandering proposal by Sup. Mark Farrell to exempt more small businesses from the city’s payroll tax, which is projected to cost the city $1.5 million next fiscal year and $2.5 million the following one, blowing a $4 million hole in the two-year budget that supervisors are now finalizing for approval in two weeks.

Yesterday, as the measure was about to receive final approval on its second reading, Avalos made a motion to delay it until after the fall election when voters may consider a pair of measures to transition from a payroll to gross receipts tax as the means of assessing local businesses. Mayor Ed Lee and Board President David Chiu introduced one measure that is revenue neutral, while an alternative by Avalos would bring in about $40 million per year.

Avalos didn’t have the votes for the long delay, so he got behind a compromise motion by Sup. Jane Kim to delay the measure until July 10 so the Budget Committee can at least factor it into its deliberations. Farrell opposed the move, insisting that “this is about creating jobs now,” despite the fact that businesses couldn’t apply for the exemption until next February.

A spirited debate followed, in which Avalos criticized City Hall’s current penchant for business tax cuts and questioned whether it really creates the jobs its boosters claim. He also noted that it is the multitude fee increases that local politicians have approved in recent years to balance the budget without raising taxes that have become most onerous for small businesses.

“When we were raising fees over the last five years, we were raising taxes on small businesses,” Avalos said, suggesting that rolling back those fees and taxing larger corporations that can afford it is a better strategy for helping small businesses and encouraging them to create jobs.

Eventually, Avalos won the short delay on a 7-4 vote, with Sups. Farrell, Carmen Chu, Sean Elsbernd, and Scott Wiener opposed.

Meanwhile, Avalos managed to place on the fall ballot an increase in the real estate transfer taxes paid on properties worth $2.5 million or more, convincing Sups. Kim, David Campos, and Eric Mar to support the proposal as the 5 pm deadline for at least four supervisors to place measures on the ballot neared. It would raise $16 million and compete with a similar measure by Lee that would raise $13 million through a smaller increase on properties worth more than $1 million.

Avalos also joined Campos and Chiu in opposing final approval for the 8 Washington housing project for the uber-wealthy. On the same 8-3 vote, the board also rejected Chiu’s efforts to allow opponents of the project to circulate referendum petitions without having to lug around a thick stack of all the studies referenced in the project approval.

Chiu appealed to his colleagues to support “citizens of San Francisco exercising the constitutional right to referendum,” but he won few sympathies on a board that these days seems most concerned with the interests of this city’s wealthiest individuals and corporations.

Ethics Commission undercuts the main witness against Mirkarimi

Sasha Cuttler

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June 20, 2012

213

Ethics Commission undercuts the main witness against Mirkarimi

The testimony of the star witness in Mayor Ed Lee’s official misconduct case against suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi came in for harsh criticism by the Ethics Commission last night, with that body striking most of it as prejudicial and unsupported hearsay evidence that should have never been introduced, something that even the city’s attorneys admitted and apologized for.

It was a serious blow to the city’s case that also undercuts the written testimony of the city’s domestic violence expert, attorney Nancy Lemon, who based much of her analysis and judgments on this discredited and disallowed testimony of Ivory Madison, the neighbor and confidante of Mirkarimi’s wife who reported the Dec. 31 domestic violence incident to police.

Meanwhile, Lee was confronted by a large pack of reporters following his monthly appearance before the Board of Supervisors earlier the day, which peppered him with pointed questions about his decision to bring what is evolving into an expensive, complicated, and nasty prosecution of Mirkarimi rather than simply allowing him to be recalled by voters. The exchange made news when Lee characterized Mirkarimi’s arm-grabbing incident as “the beating of his wife.”

Mirkarimi and his attorneys labeled that comment and much of the city’s case as simply a smear campaign that goes well beyond the narrow question of whether Mirkarimi committed official misconduct and should be removed from office, which the commission is still in the process of setting up procedures to answer.

Yesterday’s hearing dealt mostly with deciding whether to exclude or allow the written testimony of nearly two dozen witnesses. The only testimony that was stricken entirely was that of Paul Henderson, Lee’s criminal justice adviser, who testified that Mirkarimi’s guilty plea to misdemeanor false imprisonment for the grabbing incident would hurt his ability to function as the sheriff. The commission found the testimony to be irrelevant and prejudicial, clearly upsetting Deputy City Attorney Sherri Kaiser.

But the big news from last week’s hearing was the dim view that the commission took of Madison’s 22-page declaration, which painted Mirkarimi as domineering and oppressive, a bleak picture that she attributed to his wife, Eliana Lopez, as conveyed during repeated conversations between October and December as the couple was having marital problems. Madison is the main source supporting the city’s most serious allegations: that Mirkarimi abused his wife and then tried to thwart a police investigation

Commissioner Paul Renne – a career litigator appointed to the commission by the District Attorney’s Office – took the lead role in criticizing Madison’s testimony and the city for allowing it, ruing the fact that it was used by the Examiner and other media outlets to paint a defamatory “portrait of verbal abuse and child neglect inside Mirkarimi’s fear-ridden household,” as the Examiner put it on the cover of yesterday’s paper.

“I saw that and I thought maybe this idea of [taking initial testimony through written] declarations is not protective of the interests of everyone,” Renne said.

“I was disappointed by the content of Ivory Madison’s declaration. A first-year lawyer should know that much of it is inadmissible and it should not have been given to us,” Renne told Deputy City Attorney Peter Keith, calling it “clearly hearsay, clearly having the intention of poisoning the well of this hearing.”

Keith didn’t even try to defend most of the declaration, responding to Renne by saying, “We have an independent witness that is represented by [her own legal] counsel and we didn’t have control over everything that was submitted…I think the criticism is well-taken and we didn’t mean to put matters before the commission that are not relevant.”

“But you were the one who submitted the declaration,” Renne responded, telling Keith that the city must avoiding engaging in character assassination that goes beyond the scope of the commission’s inquiry, which will result in a formal recommendation going to the Board of Supervisors near the end of summer.

“My recommendation is we reject the declaration and you bring her in for live testimony,” Renne recommended. The rest of the commission seemed to agree with Renne’s criticism, but it opted to go through the declaration line-by-line, removing most of it from the proceedings. Madison is also expected to testify live and be subjected to a tough cross-examination by Mirkarimi’s attorneys, who say she has blown the incident out-of-proportion and broke the confidence of Lopez, who denies that Mirkarimi was ever abusive.

In arguing unsuccessfully for much of Madison’s written testimony to remain in the record, Keith told the commission that it was the basis for Lemon’s assessment of patterns of behavior by batterers, thus undercutting that testimony as well.

“If they’re untrue, they’re meaningless, right?” Renne asked Keith, referring to the sensational tales Madison told about Mirkarimi’s controlling behavior.

But Keith said that even if the stories Lopez told Madison were untrue or highly embellished – as Lopez’s attorney, Paula Canny, has implied as she characterized her client as building a child custody case in the event the couple divorced – they are still relevant to understanding why Madison reported Mirkarimi to the police.

“Whether or not these actions happened, it’s relevant to her concerns,” Keith said.

But Mirkarimi attorney Shepherd Kopp said that, like much of the city’s case, hearsay testimony based on flawed and prejudicial information should be irrelevant to these proceedings and shouldn’t be allowed as evidence against Mirkarimi.

“Their expert, Ms. Lemon, can believe what she wants, but that doesn’t mean it should come in as evidence,” Kopp said.

The hearing was continued to next week when Mirkarimi, Lee, and other key witnesses are expected to begin giving live testimony before the commission on June 28 and 29. Click here to read the various documents associated with the case.

Why do Lee, Chiu, and others want to stifle economic growth?

Sasha Cuttler

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June 18, 2012

16

Why do Lee, Chiu, and others want to stifle economic growth?

Why do Mayor Ed Lee, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, and San Francisco’s two major daily newspapers want to punish success? Because that’s exactly what their proposal to create a new gross receipts tax for businesses – in which corporations would be taxed more as they grow, thus encouraging economic stagnation – would do.

Right now, the city taxes businesses through a payroll tax, levying taxes based on the number of employees the company has. But under a gross receipts tax that would replace the payroll tax, employees have a disincentive to be productive and efficient and increase their companies’ profits because that would expose those companies to more of the city’s onerous tax burden.

Why would investors and employees want to grow a business in San Francisco when that would only submit them to higher taxes. Clearly, this is anti-business measure that is likely to plunge our local economy back into the depths of the recession. Don’t our leaders understand the need to help this fragile economic recovery?

Okay, okay, in case you haven’t guessed it yet, the previous three paragraphs are satire of the ridiculously overblown and misleading political rhetoric used by Lee and other critics of the city’s payroll tax, which they deride as as “job killer” that makes companies not want to hire new employees.

“Mayor Lee and Board President David Chiu proposed a gross receipts tax as an alternative to the City’s current payroll tax, which punishes companies for growing and creating new jobs in San Francisco,” Lee’s office wrote in a press release it distributed last week.

Yet my argument that a gross receipts taxes “punishes companies for growing” is just as logically sound as Lee’s argument that the payroll tax discourages companies from “creating new jobs” – and both arguments are also complete hyperbolic bullshit. But it’s seductively simple and widely parroted bullshit.

“To attract more companies to San Francisco and encourage existing employers to hire more employees, it is past time to do away with this tax,” our new neighbors down the hall, the editors of the Examiner, wrote in their editorial today, a oft-repeatedly refrain from the Chronicle and SF Chamber of Commerce as well. It later added that switching tax methods “wouldn’t penalize companies for employing people or paying them well. And city policy wouldn’t give employers any incentive to shed employees during a downturn.”

But the reality is that the 1.5 percent payroll tax is too small to really be a factor in the decision by corporations to add new employees, something they are already loath to do unless forced to by rising demand. It is simply one imperfect gauge of the size of a company and its ability to pay local taxes, just as the gross receipts tax is.

Health insurance costs, which Lee’s CPMC deal doesn’t adequate contain, is a far bigger factor in a company’s hiring decisions. So is commercial rent, which Lee’s corporate welfare policies are causing to go up downtown and throughout the city.

For decades, conservatives have tried to sell the general public on bogus trickle down economic theories that we all benefit from corporate tax cuts and that people will simply stop working if you tax them, ideas that should have been discarded as they were discredited. But they’re back with a vengeance, in supposedly liberal San Francisco of all places, actively peddled by key Lee supporters like billionaire venture capitalist Ron Conway, who only recently dropped his Republican party affiliation in favor of declined to state.

But it’s time to call out this voodoo economics for what it is: self-serving bullshit that ought to be rejected by citizens of a city that prides itself as being more educated and enlightened than the rubes in the flyover states that have been so thoroughly manipulated by the Republican Party and Blue Dog Democrats, to the detriment of our entire country.

Now, the Examiner’s argument that the business tax reform proposal would broaden and stabilize the tax base is a sound and meaningful argument, which is why the concept enjoys widespread support from across the ideological spectrum and is worth doing (although progressives rightful argue that if the tax base is being broadened then the city should reap some benefits from that, logic that Lee inexplicably resists).

Yet as the City Hall debates that will shape the details of business tax reform begin in a couple of weeks, it’s time to drop this misleading “job killer” label that has been promulgated by Republicans and other fiscal conservatives over the last decade and have an honest debate over what’s best for San Francisco’s private and public sectors.

Is the killer cyclist more negligent because of past actions?

Sasha Cuttler

-

June 14, 2012

106

Is the killer cyclist more negligent because of past actions?

Today’s announcement by District Attorney George Gascón that he filed felony vehicular manslaughter charges against Chris Bucchere, the bicyclist who hit and killed a pedestrian at the intersection of Market and Castro streets on March 29, won’t be a surprise or source of outrage to many people.

As I reported shortly thereafter, data from the cyclist training website Strava indicated that Bucchere was traveling at around 35 mph as he entered the crowded intersection on a yellow or red light. And the callous comments he made afterward to an online forum, which I also quoted, certainly cast him in an unsympathetic light.

But there is an aspect to the case that Gascon is bringing that I find vaguely unsettling: “’This tragic death caused by a bicyclist illustrates the worst case scenario when traffic laws are not obeyed,’ said District Attorney Gascón. He explained that Bucchere displayed gross negligence in operating his bicycle warranting a felony vehicular manslaughter charge. His office intends to prove that there was a pattern of traffic laws being broken by Bucchere leading up to the accident.”

If he ran a couple red lights without incident before this one, does that make him more criminally liable for the bad decision he made at this intersection? Shouldn’t the question of whether Bucchere was criminally negligent in causing 71-year-old Sutchi Hui’s death be about his decision to plow through this intersection when it wasn’t safe to do so?

Perhaps it’s an issue that helps shore up the case that he was behaving in a reckless way. But this is going to be an emotional case and one likely to be trumpeted by the handful of cyclist-haters out there for whom our tendency to roll stop signs is the source of real anger and condemnation, with many blog commenters in the past wishing me a violent death for doing so, threatening to carry out the deed themselves, and saying they would feel only pride in doing so.

If one of these crazies plows into me when I’m riding legally, will I be blamed because I ran a red light a few intersections ago? Will they cite my admission in the Guardian that I often break traffic laws and say I had it coming? Would the decision that Bucchere made as he was screaming down Castro toward that fateful intersection be less negligent if he had stopped at previous intersections?

With the bitter resentments that some San Franciscans feel toward cyclists so palpable and potentially dangerous, it will be easy to lose perspective on this case and make Bucchere emblematic of all cyclists, as dishonest as that may be. And I think it’s incumbent upon Gascón to try to prevent that from happening.

This is an isolated and unusual case of a young man making a tragic mistake for which he will pay a heavy price, no more and no less.

Restore Hetch Hetchy conjures corporate boogiemen

Sasha Cuttler

-

June 14, 2012

75

Restore Hetch Hetchy conjures corporate boogiemen

The campaign for a ballot measure that seeks to create a plan for tearing down the O’Shaughnessy Dam – San Francisco’s main source of clean water and power – and turning the Hetch Hetchy Valley into a tourist destination must be having a hard time collecting the 9,702 signatures it needs by July 9 because it is resorting to conjuring up unlikely boogiemen to win public sympathy.

Restore Hetch Hetchy just sent out a press release accusing opponents of the measure of preparing a “tobacco industry-style negative ad blitz” funded by venture capitalist Ron Conway and other corporate evildoers.

“Just like the tobacco industry’s big money confused so many people into opposing the Prop. 29 tobacco tax they initially supported, now we’re seeing corporate money flowing like a dirty river right into the coffers of what promises to be yet another nasty negative campaign,” said Mike Marshall, campaign director for the Yosemite Restoration Campaign, which his Restore Hetch Hetchy group is sponsoring.

It cites a statement made by the Bay Area Council – which they helpfully remind us includes “PG&E, Chevron, and Mitt Romney’s former company Bain & Co.” – that Conway has pledged $25,000 to the opposition campaign.

Where do I even begin to unravel this ridiculously hyperbolic and misleading appeal? Let’s start with the fact this has nothing to do with Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Capitalists, or Big Utilities. It isn’t corporations that are standing in the way of spending billions of dollars to tear down the dam and replace the lost power and water – it is just about every elected official in the region, from across the political spectrum, and any San Franciscan who has at least as much reason and sentimentality. As for PG&E, I’m sure the utility would just love to see San Francisco’s main source of electricity torn down, which would only expand its monopolistic control of our energy system.

Frankly, the misleading release reeks of desperation, and when I asked campaign consultant Jon Golinger whether the campaign is in trouble, he responded, “We are certainly quite clear this is a David versus Goliath situation, or whatever analogy you want to make.”

Okay, how about a Fantasy versus Reality situation? Or a Past versus Present situation? Or San Franciscans versus Dan Lungren, the right wing member of Congress who has been pushing to remove the dam supposedly because he loves Yosemite Valley so much and wants to create another one (or, more likely, because he wants to tweak the San Francisco liberals and get us fighting among ourselves over something pointless and distracting).

I’m sorry, but I just can’t get my head around the appeal of this idea, which the Sacramento Bee editorial writers actually won a Pulitzer Prize for conjuring up in 2004, certainly another sign of the modern decline in journalism standards. I get that legendary conservationist John Muir was right and this dam probably shouldn’t have been built, and that it might be kinda cool to have another beautiful valley to hike in once the sludge dries up over a few decades.

But when we can’t even find adequate funding for public transit, renewable energy sources, and the multitude of other things that really would help the environment – not to mention while we’re heading into an era when water supplies in the Sierras could be depleted by climate change – do we really want to spend billions of dollars to fetishize one valley and destroy the engineering marvel that is one of the best and most energy-efficient sources of urban water in the country?

Or am I just shilling for Big Tobacco and Mitt Romney because that’s how I see it?

No deal yet on business tax reform as competing measure are introduced

Sasha Cuttler

-

June 12, 2012

21

No deal yet on business tax reform as competing measure are introduced

Mayor Ed Lee and his business community allies failed to reach an agreement with labor and progressives by today’s deadline for submitting fall ballot measures to the Board of Supervisors, leading progressive Sup. John Avalos to introduce a business tax reform measure that would compete with Lee’s proposal.

The Avalos measure would raise $40 million in new General Fund revenue to restore recent cuts to city services while Lee’s would essentially be revenue-neutral, although Lee did tweak the formulas to raise about $13 million in new revenue that would be dedicated to a new Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which would be created by another ballot measure that Lee was having a hard time funding in the face of business community opposition.

“I don’t believe trickle down economics works, except for the 1 percent,” Avalos told the Guardian, arguing the importance of recovering revenue that the city lost when the biggest downtown corporations sued the city in 2001 to invalidate a gross receipts tax. Both the Lee and Avalos measures would gradually convert the current payroll tax into a new version of the gross receipts tax, which is preferred by most of the business community.

So, will voters in the fall be faced with competing ballot measures? Probably not, according to the same sources from the business and progressive sides of the negotiations who told us last week that it appeared a deal was in the offing, something they still believe.

“This is the beginning of the negotiations,” said the business community source, noting that both measures won’t be approved until next month, with discussions about merging them ongoing. “I’m sure this is part of the process and they will agree on a number.”

Our labor source agreed, predicting the two sides will come to an agreement because neither side wants competing ballot measure, but noting that Lee appears to be trying to create divisions between the progressive revenue coalition and the affordable housing advocates. “That’s just positioning on their part, but it doesn’t feel like good faith bargaining,” the source said.

Mayoral Press Secretary Christine Falvey seemed to leave the door open for compromise, telling the Guardian, “The Mayor believes that to be successful, we should continue building consensus around business tax reform and that it’s important that the business community continue to be key partners in that effort.”

Lee is trying to placate an emboldened business community, which has taken a hard line position on opposing new taxes even while seeking ever more tax breaks and public subsidies. In fact, Sup. Mark Farrell had another business tax cut on today’s board agenda, cutting the payroll tax for small businesses at a cost of more than $2 million to city finances.

“I believe we need to do all we can to incentivize job growth in our small business community,” Farrell said.

Avalos said he agrees with helping small businesses – which is why both his and Lee’s business tax reform measure shifts more of the tax burden to the large corporations that have been so profitable in recent years – but that “we should not be putting a hole in the city’s budget to do so.”

In a sign of just how strong the business community has become at City Hall compared to the progressive movement that had a board majority just two years ago, the tax cuts were approved on a 10-1 vote, with only Avalos opposed.

Hospital standoff

Andrew Lam

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June 12, 2012

2

steve@sfbg.com

The controversial and long-awaited proposal by California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) to build a 550-bed luxury hospital atop Cathedral Hill and to rebuild St. Luke’s Hospital has finally arrived at the Board of Supervisors — where it appears to have little support.

So far, not one supervisor has stepped up to sponsor the deal, and board members say it will have to undergo major changes to meet the city’s needs. “There are still a lot of questions that remain,” Sup. David Campos told us, citing labor, housing, community benefits, and a long list of other issues that he doesn’t believe CPMC has adequately addressed. “It tells me there’s still more work to be done.”

CPMC, which is Sacramento-based nonprofit corporation Sutter Health’s most lucrative affiliate, has been pushing the project for almost a decade. Its advocates have subtly used a state seismic safety deadline for rebuilding St. Luke’s — a hospital relied on by low-income residents of the Mission District and beyond — as leverage to build the massive Cathedral Hill Hospital it envisions as the Mayo Clinic of the West Coast.

But the project’s draft environmental impact report shows the Cathedral Hill Hospital would have huge negative impacts on the city’s transportation system and exacerbate its affordable housing crisis. And CPMC has been in a pitched battle with its labor unions over its refusal to guarantee the new jobs will go to current employees or local residents and be unionized. There are also concerns with the market power CPMC will gain from the project, how that will affect health care costs paid by the city and its residents, and with the company’s appallingly low charity care rates compared to other health care providers (see “Lack of charity,” 12/13/11).

CPMC had refused to budge in negotiations with the Mayor’s Office under two mayors, for which Mayor Ed Lee publicly criticized the company’s intransigence last year. But under pressure from the business community and local trade unions who support the project, Lee cut a deal with CPMC in March.

That development agreement for the $2.5 billion project calls for CPMC to pay $33 million for public transit and roadway improvements, $20 million to endow community clinics and other social services, and $62 million for affordable housing programs, nearly half of which would go toward helping its employees buy existing homes.

While those numbers seem large, community and labor leaders from San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice (SFHHJJ), which formed in opposition to the project, say they don’t cover anywhere near the project’s full impacts. And given that CPMC made about $180 million in profit last year in San Francisco alone — money that subsidizes the rest of Sutter’s operations — they say the company can and should do better.

“This is about standing up to corporate blackmail,” SFHHJJ member Steve Woo, a community organizer with the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, told us.

PIVOTAL PROJECT

CPMC is perhaps the most high-profile project the board will consider this year, one that will impact the city for years, so the political and economic stakes are high.

The Planning Commission voted 5-1 on April 26 to approve the deal and its environmental impact report, citing the project’s economic benefits and the looming deadline for rebuilding St. Luke’s. The Board of Supervisors was scheduled to consider the appeal of that decision on June 12 (after Guardian press time), but activists say supervisors planned to continue the item until July 17.

In the meantime, the board’s Land Use Committee has scheduled a series of hearings on different aspects of the project, starting June 15 with a project overview and presentation on the jobs issue, continuing June 25 with a hearing on its impacts to the health care system. Traffic and neighborhood impacts would be heard the next week, and then housing after that.

Calvin Welch, a progressive activist and nonprofit affordable housing developer, said the project’s EIR makes clear just how paltry CPMC’s proposed mitigation measures are. It indicates that the project’s 3,000 new workers will create a demand for at least 1,400 new two-bedroom housing units. Even accepting that estimate — which Welch says is low given that many employees have families and won’t simply be bunking with one another — the $26 million being provided for new housing construction would only create about 90 affordable studio apartments.

“We’re going to end up, if we want to house that workforce, subsidizing CPMC,” Welch told us.

Compounding that shortcoming is the fact that the Cathedral Hill Hospital is being built in a special use district that city officials established for the Van Ness corridor — where there is a severe need for more housing, particularly affordable units. The SUD calls for developers to build three square feet of residential for every square foot of non-residential development.

“That would require building 3 million square feet of residential housing with this project,” Welch said. “We don’t think $26 million meets the housing requirement for this project, let alone what was envisioned by this [Van Ness corridor] plan.”

SFHHJJ is calling for CPMC to provide at least $73 million for affordable housing, with no more than 20 percent of that going to the company’s first-time homebuyer assistance program. That assistance program does nothing to add to the city’s housing stock and critics call it a valuable employee perk that will only increase the demand for existing housing — and thus drive up prices.

But the business community is strongly backing the deal, and the trade unions are expected to turn out hordes of construction workers at the hearing to make this an issue of jobs — rather than a corporation paying for its impacts to the community.

“After a decade of discussion, debate and compromise, the city’s departments, commissions, labor, business and community groups all agree on CPMC,” San Francisco Chamber of Commerce President Steve Falk wrote in a June 8 e-mail blast entitled “Message to the Board of Supervisors: Don’t Stand in the Way of Progress.”

“The fate of our city’s healthcare infrastructure now lies solely with the Board of Supervisors,” the Chamber says. “When it comes time to vote, let’s insist they make the right choice.”

Yet it’s simply inaccurate to say that labor and community groups support the deal, and both are expected to be well-represented at the hearings.

CARE FOR WHOM?

Economic justice issues related to health care access and costs are another potential pitfall for this project. SFJJHH activists note that no supervisors have signed on to sponsor the project yet — which is unusual for something this big — and that even the board’s most conservative supervisors have raised concerns that the city’s health care costs aren’t adequately contained by the deal.

“There’s a significant amount of dissatisfaction with the deal, even among conservatives,” SFJJHH member Paul Kumar, a spokesperson for the National Union of Healthcare Workers, told the Guardian.

On the progressive side, a big concern is that CPMC is proposing to rebuild the 220-bed St. Luke’s with only 80 beds, which activists say is not enough. And even then, CPMC is only agreeing to operate that hospital for 20 years, or even less time if Sutter’s fortunes turn around and the hospital giant begins losing money.

CPMC Director of Communications Kathryn Graham, responding by email to questions and issues raised by the Guardian, wrote generally and positively about CPMC and the project without addressing the specific concerns about whether housing, transportation, and other mitigation payments are too low.

On the jobs issue, she wrote, “Our project will create 1,500 union construction jobs immediately—and preserves and protects the 6,200 health care professional jobs that exist today at the hospitals. Currently, nearly 50 percent of our current employees live in San Francisco. During the construction phase of this project, we are committed to hire at least 30 percent of workers from San Francisco. We will create 500 permanent new jobs in just the next five years—200 are guaranteed to be local hires from underserved San Francisco neighborhoods. We don’t know where you got the ridiculous idea that our employees must reapply for jobs at our new hospitals. That is incorrect.”

Yet CPMC has resisted requests by the California Nurses Association and other unions to be recognized at the new facility or to agree to card-check neutrality that would make it easier to unionize. And union representatives say CPMC has offered few assurances about staffing, pay, seniority, and other labor issues.

As one CNA official told us, “If they aren’t going to guarantee jobs to the existing employees, those are jobs lost to the city.”

“We’re giving Sutter a franchise over San Francisco’s health care system for 30 to 40 years, so we should ensure there are basic worker and community protections,” Kumar said.

Welch and other activists say they believe CPMC is prepared to offer much more than it has agreed to so far, and they’re calling on the supervisors to be tougher negotiators than the Mayor’s Office was, including being willing to vote down the project and start over if it comes down to that.

“They make too much money in this city to just leave town,” Welch said of CPMC’s implied threat to pull out of San Francisco and shutter St. Luke’s. “It’s bullshit.”

The biggest burn ever

Andrew Lam

-

June 12, 2012

0

steve@sfbg.com

Burning Man is more popular than ever, judging by a demand for tickets that far exceeded supply this year, after selling out last year for the first time in its 26-year history — and now this year’s event will be far bigger than ever.

The Bureau of Land Management, which manages the Nevada desert where burners build Black Rock City every August, has set a population cap for Burning Man at 60,900, an increase of more than 10,000 over previous events.

For Black Rock City LLC, the San Francisco-based company that stages Burning Man, there was mixed news in BLM’s June 12 permit decision.

BRC was denied the multi-year event permit it sought, but as it struggles to meet demand for this increasingly popular countercultural institution, BLM honored BRC’s late request for more people than the 58,000 it had sought for this year.

“After further discussions, there were requests for a bit more,” Cory Roegner, who oversees the event from BLM’s district office in Winnemucca, told us. Asked why BRC sought the population bump, he said, “The more people they can have, the better.”

BLM has been processing BRC’s lengthy environment assessment and its request for a five-year permit that would allow the event to grow steadily from 58,000 to 70,000 people in 2016. The cap for this year could have been set as low at 50,000, creating some drama around this announcement, but the agency instead issued a single-year permit with a population cap of 60,900.

BRC was placed on probation last fall after violating its 50,000-person cap by a few thousand people each on Sept. 2 and 3, and BLM rules limit groups on probation to a single-year permit. BRC has appealed the status to the Interior Board of Land Appeals, which has not yet acted on it or answered Guardian inquiries.

“Unless we do hear back from them, Black Rock City would be precluded from a multi-year permit,” Roegner told us.

He also said that if BRC violates the population cap for a second year in a row, it could be barred from holding future events, although the high population cap should mean that won’t be a big problem this year, clearing the way for Burning Man’s steady growth through at least 2016.

“Based on the evaluation [of this year’s event], we will consider a multi-year permit going to 2016,” Roegner told us.

BRC has already sold 57,000 tickets and will give away thousands more to art collectives, staff, and VIPs. But the cap is based on a daily population count and BRC board member Marian Goodell said the event never has all attendees there at once.

She said staying below the cap this year shouldn’t be difficult given that many of those who build the city and work on the major art pieces leave before the final weekend when the eponymous Man burns. “Usually at least 6,000 leave before we hit the peak. Sometimes more on dusty, wet, or cold years,” she told us.

It could have been a lot more difficult. BLM officials had told the Guardian in April that they were considering keeping last year’s population cap of 50,000, which could have presented BRC with a logistical nightmare and/or ticket-holder backlash in trying to stay under the cap.

“The issue between us and the BLM continues to be the population cap,” Burning Man founder Larry Harvey told the Guardian.

Harvey, Goodell, and others with BRC took a lobbying trip to Washington DC in late April trying to shore up political support for the event and its culture, arguing that it has become important for artistic and technical innovation and community building rather than just a big party.

Harvey told us he believes that Burning Man could grow to 100,000 participants, although he conceded that would need further study and creative solutions to key problems such as getting people to and from the isolated location accessed only by one highway lane in each direction.

“We think we could go to 100,000 if it was measured growth, carefully planned,” Harvey said.

On the transportation question, he said, “it’s a question of flow.” Right now, participants arriving or leaving on peak days often wait in lines that can take four hours or more.

“We’ve talked to engineers that have proposed solutions to that,” Harvey said of the transportation issue, although he wouldn’t discuss possible solutions except to say, “You could exit in a more phased fashion.”

Roegner said that was one of the big issues identified in the EA. “We are taking a closer look at a couple items this year, traffic being one,” he said. Another one is the use of decomposed granite, which is placed under flaming artworks to prevent burn scars on the playa, and making sure it is properly cleaned up each year.

BRC was facing a bit of a crisis in confidence after this year’s ticket debacle, when a new lottery-based ticket distribution system and higher than expected demand left up to two-thirds of burner veterans without tickets. The resulting furor caused BRC to abandon plans for a secondary sale and instead sell the final 10,000 tickets through established theme camps, art collectives, and volunteers groups.

“It’s pretty obvious that we’ll do something like that again because we don’t expect demand to go down,” Harvey said of that direct distribution of tickets, which was criticized in some burner circles as promoting favoritism and undermining the event’s stated principle of inclusivity.

Yet he also emphasized that much of Burning Man’s growth is occurring off the playa — in cities and at regional events around the world. “All of this is by way of dealing with the capacity problem. I don’t know how much we can grow in the Black Rock Desert,” he said.

Another realm full of both possibilities and perils — depending on one’s perspective — is the ongoing development of The Burning Man Project, a nonprofit that BRC created last year to gradually take on new initiatives, followed by taking over staging of the event, and eventually (probably in five years) full control of Burning Man and its brand and trademarks.

“God knows, we have a lot of opportunities before us,” Harvey said, adding that BMP is now focused on fundraising. “It is the objective before we transfer the event to start transferring the regional events, and that will take more money and staff.”

After that, he sees unlimited potential to grow the culture, not just Black Rock City. “We’ve got to focus on the people. We’re becoming less event-centric,” he said. “We think of this as a cultural movement.”

Guardian City Editor Steven T. Jones is the author of The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture. For reactions and details on the EA, visit the sfbg.com politics blog.

Burning Man population cap set at 60,900, way more than ever

Sasha Cuttler

-

June 12, 2012

64

Burning Man population cap set at 60,900, way more than ever

Burning Man is more popular than ever, judging by a demand for tickets that far exceeded supply this year, after selling out last year for the first time in its 26-year history — and now this year’s event will be far bigger than ever.

The Bureau of Land Management, which manages the Nevada desert where burners build Black Rock City every August, has set a population cap for Burning Man at 60,900, an increase of more than 10,000 over previous events.

For Black Rock City LLC, the San Francisco-based company that stages Burning Man, there was mixed news in BLM’s June 12 permit decision. BRC was denied the multi-year event permit it sought, but as it struggles to meet demand for this increasingly popular countercultural institution, BLM honored BRC’s late request for more people than the 58,000 it had sought for this year.

“After further discussions, there were requests for a bit more,” Cory Roegner, who oversees the event from BLM’s district office in Winnemucca, told us. Asked why BRC sought the population bump, he said, “The more people they can have, the better.”

BLM has been processing BRC’s lengthy environment assessment and its request for a five-year permit that would allow the event to grow steadily from 58,000 to 70,000 people in 2016. The cap for this year could have been set as low as 50,000, creating some drama around this announcement, but the agency instead issued a single-year permit with a population cap of 60,900.

BRC was placed on probation last fall after violating its 50,000-person cap by a few thousand people each on Sept. 2 and 3, and BLM rules limit groups on probation to a single-year permit. BRC has appealed the status to the Interior Board of Land Appeals, which has not yet acted on it or answered Guardian inquiries.

“Unless we do hear back from them, Black Rock City would be precluded from a multi-year permit,” Roegner told us.

He also said that if BRC violates the population cap for a second year in a row, it could be barred from holding future events, although the high population cap should mean that won’t be a big problem this year, clearing the way for Burning Man’s steady growth through at least 2016.

“Based on the evaluation [of this year’s event], we will consider a multi-year permit going to 2016,” Roegner told us.

BRC has already sold 57,000 tickets and will give away thousands more to art collectives, staff, and VIPs. But the cap is based on a daily population count and BRC board member Marian Goodell said the event never has all attendees there at once.

She said staying below the cap this year shouldn’t be a problem given that many of those who build the city and work on the major art pieces leave before the final weekend when the eponymous Man burns. “Usually at least 6,000 leave before we hit the peak. Sometimes more on dusty, wet, or cold years,” she told us.