Steven T. Jones

BART “mistake” threatens its contract agreement with workers UPDATED

Sasha Cuttler
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35
BART “mistake” threatens its contract agreement with workers UPDATED

Just when it appeared the ugly contract impasse between BART management and workers was over — a divisive struggle that resulted in two debilitating four-day strikes and the Oct. 19 death of two workers struck by a train being used to train possible replacement drivers — BART management is threatening to scuttle the deal over a provision it says was mistakenly added to the contract.

At issue is a contract provision where BART workers from SEIU Local 1021 and ATU Local 1555 who go on leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act will be paid for six of the 12 weeks the law allows them to take unpaid, BART spokesperson Luna Salaver told the Guardian.

While BART management and its negotiators — including Assistant General Manager of Operations Paul Oversier and Thomas Hock, a contractor who the district paid $400,000 to lead its negotiations — signed off on the provision back in July and again when the final deal was reached last month, Salaver said BART didn’t mean to include it.

“It was a mistake that a provision rejected twice by BART management ended up in the stack of approved documents,” Salaver said, noting that it was caught this week as the district prepared to give the contract final approval on Nov. 21. It has already been approved by the two unions.

“We were never confused as to the status of the Family and Medical Leave Act agreement,” Local 1021 Political Director Chris Daly told the Guardian, calling the provision a reasonable benefit similar to one that he sponsored for city employees when he was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

But Salaver said it could add tens of millions of dollars in costs (the district still isn’t sure how much) to a contact that will already cost the district an additional $67 million, so management is convening a special session of BART’s Board of Directors this afternoon (Fri/15) to discuss the issue, saying that management isn’t yet recommending the contract be rejected, as some had reported. [UPDATE: The BART board told administrators to re-open negotiations with the unions, but the unions are resisting a return to the bargaining table and urge the board to approve the contract on Thursday].

“There is an erroneous report that BART management is going to tell the BART board to reject the contract,” Salaver told us, inside calling the closed-session discussion a “fact-finding session.”

But Daly said BART management had told the unions that it would recommend rejection of the contract, and that it is now backpedaling because some directors are unhappy with the snafu. It also has a serious public relations problem on its hands, finding itself in a position to reignite the battle with workers while also contending with angry state legislators and an ongoing NTSB investigation into its culpability in the worker deaths.   

 

The complete prepared statement issued last night from SEIU 1021 Executive Director Pete Castelli follows:  

“BART Management has been in contact regarding the tentative agreement they reached with SEIU 1021 and ATU 1555 on October 21st and which our members unanimously ratified. We’ve been informed that they’ve scheduled a special meeting with the BART Board of Directors to discuss the terms of the contract and to clarify details regarding certain provisions for tomorrowafternoon.

“In July, BART Management and its unions reached a tentative agreement on family medical leave, which was signed by BART Management and their chief negotiator. During a thorough review of the final settlement last month, BART Management and their attorneys did not raise any concerns about how this tentative agreement or other provisions in the final settlement would prevent them from recommending the contract to the Board for approval.

“It’s disappointing to hear BART Management would recommend that the BART Board reject this agreement—a contract they negotiated with their workers for more than five months, signed, and praised in the public as a fair compromise.

“We expect the BART Board of Directors to vote on and approve this fair and reasonable contract.”

O+ Festival trades health care for music and art performances

Sasha Cuttler
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0

Artists struggle for their art, but they shouldn’t also have to also sacrifice their health. That’s the basic premise behind this weekend’s three-day O+ Festival in San Francisco, where musicians and other artists will perform in exchange for medical, dental, and wellness services at a pop-up clinic at The Center SF art space on Fillmore Street and other offices around town.

“Bartering the art of medicine for the medicine of art,” is the tagline for a festival that is making its debut outside of New York, where it began. The lineup includes local folk rockers Papa Bear & Friends, soulful singer Quinn DeVeaux, mashup DJ Zack Darling, and many more, performing in venues that include Inner Mission and the Make-Out Room.

The festival began in 2010 in Kingston, NY, when painter Joe Concra had a dentist friend who had the idea of bringing a band he liked up from Brooklyn and paying them in free dental services. The idea resonated with Concra, who knew well how much New York’s artists struggled to make ends meet.

“Artists are not only being pushed out, but they’re not able to get the healing they deserve,” Concra told the Guardian, saying the first festival was such a hit that it took on a life of its own. “Once we do it, once people go, then they really get it. And it goes back to the age-old idea of trade.”

Long before modern health insurance debacles, doctors and dentists were members of their communities, and people would pay them with whatever they had to offer. But today, larger and larger companies providing care in collaboration with insurance companies, even the basic community clinic is becoming a thing of the past.

“We’re breaking down that access to care barrier, because some many people don’t know where to start,” Concra said, saying he was surprised at the flood gates opened by his simple idea. “Now, we’re at the point where we have 220 bands applies for 40 spots…We were not prepared for the amount of need in the artist community.”

Concra had started thinking about where to expand the festival when he was contacted by Deborah Gatiss, San Francisco-based artist and event coordinator, who had heard about the concept from a friend in the Burning Man Project.  

“It goes back to May of last year, and I was lamenting the fact that I have no health care, because I had a really bad toothache. I was talking with a friend of mine and we were discussing things people could do for health care when they have no dental insurance and this was one of the things that came up,” she told us.

Concra was already talking about a Bay Area event with Aimee Gardner, who he knew from an art gallery in Kingston before she moved to California, and Gardner and Gatiss ended up spearheading the creation of O+ Festival-San Francisco.

“Coming from New York, I feel like San Francisco is going a similar direction,” Gardner said of artists who can’t afford to live here. “I think it’s a really revolutionary idea. It’s activism in a very thoughtful way.”

The pair managed to line up sponsors and a list of volunteer health practioners from a variety of disciplines, people that Concra called “the real rock stars of this event.” So while the performers get free health care, those who buy the $25 tickets get three days of free music and art, discounted drinks at various venues, and even free yoga classes at Yoga Tree’s new Potrero Hill studio.

The festival opens tomorrow (Fri/15) at 6:15 at The Center SF, 548 Fillmore, with a health care panel discussion featuring Concra, Artist Xavi Panneton, Dan Kitowski of the Actors Fund, and me, Guardian Editor Steven T. Jones.

Gatiss said it’s been a challenge to pull together such an ambtious festival and she hopes that Bay Area residents — who love art and music and are accustomed to gift and barter economies through things like Burning Man — will turn out to show their support.

“I thought that people were used to that mindset, so they’d be up for the idea of bartering their musical talents for health care and vice versa,” Gatiss told us. “It’s been harder than I thought. But it’s been fulfilling and magical and I’m glad that I did it, and I think Aimee would say the same thing.”

 

BART’s safety culture slammed at Assembly hearing

Michael Redmond
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1

BART was slammed by legislators and its workers on Nov. 7 for refusing to make a key worker safety improvement demanded by state regulators since a 2008 fatality, instead choosing to aggressively defend the “simple approval” process that contributed to two more fatalities on Oct. 19, after which the district finally made the change.

The Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment had already planned the San Francisco hearing into why BART spent years appealing rulings by the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration before the recent tragedy, but that incident sharpened criticism of the district for valuing efficiency over safety.

“The culture of safety at BART must change,” said BART train operator Jesse Hunt, who gave dramatic testimony about the callous culture at BART that led to the Oct. 19 tragedy. “It’s not a single incident, it’s a pattern of disregard for safety.”

The hearing also delved into why BART had an uncertified trainee at the helm of the train that killed Christopher Sheppard and Laurence Daniels on Oct. 19, despite warnings by its unions that district preparations to run limited service during the strike would be unsafe (see “Tragedy follows strike,” Oct. 23).

“Simple approval” made employees doing work on the tracks responsible to avoid being hit by trains moving silently at up to 80mph. When BART exhausted its administrative appeals of Cal-OSHA’s rulings in June, it filed a lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court and continued to defend the practice, which its unions had long sought to end.

“BART challenged that citation and continues to do so to this day,” Chair Roger Hernandez (D-West Covina) said in his opening remarks, noting that it took two recent fatalities for BART to drop its stance. “I’m deeply troubled this decision wasn’t made much earlier.”

For BART, the hearing only went downhill from there as state regulators testified to the district’s litigious refusal to adopt important safety precautions, employees painted a picture of a district hostile to them and their safety concerns, and legislators chastised BART managers for not having reasonable answers to their questions.

In response, BART Assistant General Manager of Operations Paul Oversier denied the district undervalues safety and said that it defended the simple approval process because it had been used tens of thousand of times and, “We had a track record in mind of a procedure that was working well.”

Asked whether he continues to defend it after the Oct. 19 incident, Oversier said, “Irrespective of what our opinion might be, we suspended the simple approval process,” a decision that he said could disrupt service, increase costs, and “that may cause us to look at what our hours of operation are.”

The hearing was called by Assemblymember Phil Ting, D-SF, who said in his opening remarks, “I was very concerned to read many of the OSHA findings, that it found BART was in violation of California state law,” which prohibits employers from making workers responsible for their own safety in dangerous situations.

Later, Ting questioned BART Chief Safety Officer Jeff Lau about how many of OSHA’s safety violations it had taken steps to correct versus how many it continues to resist, a question Lau said that he couldn’t answer. “I’m extraordinarily disappointed in your response,” Ting told Lau, demanding that he prepare a detailed written response to the questions and submit it to the committee, which plans to revisit the issue once more details emerge from the NTSA investigation of the Oct. 19 incident.

Tale of two parties: Voters reject 8 Washington project

Michael Redmond
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21

From the Election Night victory party for opponents of the 8 Washington waterfront luxury condo project, the overwhelming defeat of developer-backed Propositions B and C seemed to go beyond just this project. It sounded and felt like a blow against Mayor Ed Lee’s economic policies, the gentrification of the city, and the dominion that developers and power brokers have at City Hall.

“What started as a referendum on height limits on the waterfront has become a referendum on the mayor and City Hall,” former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin told the large and buoyant crowd, a message repeated again and again at the Nov. 5 gathering.

Former Mayor Art Agnos also cast the victory over 8 Washington as the people standing up against narrow economic and political interests that want to dictate what gets built on public land on the waterfront, driven by larger concerns about who controls San Francisco and who gets to live here.

“This is not the end, this is the beginning and it feels like a movement,” Agnos told the crowd. “We’ll have to tell the mayor that his legacy,” a term Lee has used to describe the Warriors Arena he wants to build on Piers 30-32,” is not going to be on our waterfront.”

Campaign Manager Jon Golinger also described the victory in terms of a political awakening and turning point: “We are San Francisco and you just heard us roar!”

Campaign consultant Jim Stearns told the Guardian that he thought the measures would be defeated, but everyone was surprised by the wide margin — the initiative B lost by 25 percentage points, the referendum C was 33 points down — which he attributed to the “perfect storm” of opposition.

Stearns cited three factors that triggered the overwhelming defeat: recent populist outrage over the city’s affordability crisis, concerns about waterfront height crossing ideological lines, and “a tone deaf City Hall that didn’t want to hear there were any problems with the project.”

Among the key project opponents who have sometimes stood in opposition to the city’s progressives was former City Attorney Louise Renne, who blasted City Hall and called the Planning Department “utterly disgraceful,” telling the crowd, “Get your rest, more to come, San Francisco.”

Both progressive and political moderates often share a distrust of the close connections between powerful developers and the Mayor’s Office, and that seemed to play out in this campaign and at the polls.

“San Francisco, this victory is for you,” Renne said. “And to all those developers out there: Do not mess with our waterfront. We’re not going to stand for it.”

Meanwhile, it was a very different scene over at the Yes on B and C party.

Developer Simon Snellgrove, whose 8 Washington project was soundly rejected despite his spending almost $2 million on the campaign, was in no mood to comment. “I’m having a little private party tonight,” he told us, “and I don’t want to talk to the press.”

Rose Pak, a consultant for the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce who is well-known for her ties to powerful interests in the city, had a small circle of guests around her throughout the night and spent some time catching up with Snellgrove. Asked to comment, Pak said, “I don’t know the Bay Guardian,” and stopped making eye contact. At previous events, Pak has lectured Guardian reporters about what she sees as the paper’s shortcomings.

“I think this project got caught up in a lot of other things,” Jim Lazarus, the vice president for public policy at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, told us. “There was a lot of I think mistaken concern about the impact.”

He criticized the focus on building heights and the idea that it was about something more than just a waterfront development project. But this was the outcome, he said, because “an unholy alliance of people got together to oppose the project.”

Perhaps “unholy alliance” is in the eyes of the beholder, but the voters of San Francisco seemed to prefer the alliance that opposed 8 Washington and all that it has come to represent in San Francisco. 

 

How San Francisco should really be helping the Philippines

Sasha Cuttler
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49
How San Francisco should really be helping the Philippines

There were a couple good stories in today’s San Francisco Chronicle related to concerns the Guardian and its readers have sounded in recent months: Mayoral appointees blocking CleanPowerSF against the will of the elected Board of Supervisors, and the massive scale of the proposed Warriors Arena, which is now getting slightly downsized.

It was getting a little lonely beating the drum over the anti-democratic actions of the Mayor Ed Lee and his minions to undermine the only plan San Francisco has to substantially decrease its greenhouse gas emissions and meet its own ambitious goals for addressing climate change. Glad to see the Chronicle turn up the heat, at least in its news section (unlike the neocon neanderthals that write the paper’s editorials).

While the mainstream media sometimes does good work, it usually fails to connect the dots, which is an important journalistic function. So if I would find fault with the otherwise solid and long overdue story by reporters Marisa Lagos and David R. Baker, it would be with its failure to note that CleanPowerSF is really the only plan for seriously addressing climate change, which is one of the biggest and most impactful challenges we face.

This morning on KQED’s Forum, while discussing the devastating typhoon that struck the Philippines — one of the strongest ever recorded — they did connect the dots between the severity of that storm and the warming oceans of the world, albeit in fairly detached and non-urgent way.

So please allow me to connect another dot.

“Our hearts go out to all of those who have suffered in the Philippines from possibly the world’s strongest storm. The people of the Philippines are in our thoughts and prayers today, and we will continue to support them in the days and months ahead as we learn the true impact caused by Typhoon Haiyan,” Mayor Lee said Friday in a prepared statement sent to the media. “San Francisco stands ready to aid in the rebuilding and recovery efforts. The work of rebuilding communities begins immediately, and San Francisco understands how important a sustained, vigorous recovery effort is. Our City stands ready with the Bay Area Filipino-American community to assist today and into the future to help in the rebuilding efforts in the Philippines.”

What he didn’t mention was climate change. While it’s great that San Franciscans stand ready to address the effects of this and other natural disasters — which all the global warming models show will become stronger and more frequent — why aren’t we willing to show more leadership in addressing the root cause of this problem?

Instead of collaborating with developers on ever more ambitious schemes to build expensive buildings on a waterfront that will already be challenged by rising seas, the Mayor’s Office should be channeling its energies into making San Francisco a role model for other 21st century cities to follow.

The real challenges that we and other cities around the world face now are how to address poverty, the energy and transportation needs of a growing population, and a planet in peril; instead, this Mayor’s Office is focused on poaching Oakland’s basketball team and building more housing for the 1 percent.

If Mayor Lee is serious about the sympathies he’s expressing for vulnerable populations in the developing world, then he and allies should do more than send care packages when they are devastated by the byproducts of the wasteful and overly consumptive economic policies that they are promoting.  

NYT asks, “Is it okay to kill cyclists?”

Sasha Cuttler
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157
NYT asks, “Is it okay to kill cyclists?”

It was great to read the provocative opinion piece about cycling in San Francisco in yesterday’s The New York Times’ Sunday Review (“Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?”), which amplified recent reporting and editorial messages from the Bay Guardian.

Kudos especially to the writer of that headline, which crystallizes the issue beautifully. San Francisco and other cities have essentially sanctioned violence against cyclists by refusing to issue citations against negligent motorists who kill and seriously injure cyclists. (It’s a sadly similar story with pedestrians, as a Bay Citizen investigation found last year).

“There is something undeniably screwy about a justice system that makes it de facto legal to kill people, even when it is clearly your fault, as long you’re driving a car and the victim is on a bike and you’re not obviously drunk and don’t flee the scene,” wrote Daniel Duane, a San Franciscan who now says he’s too scared to ride local roadways.

San Francisco will never get anywhere close to its official goal of having 20 percent of all vehicle trips being by bicycle by 2020 if the San Francisco Police Department focuses more on harassing cyclists running stop signs than it does on citing motorists that are actually responsible for most car versus cyclist collisions (according to a study cited in the article).

The reasoning for going easy on drivers who kill cyclists and pedestrians has been the assumption that juries won’t convict because “accidents happen” and we all need to keep driving, right? But that societal attitude causes problems ranging for needless death to global warming, and it only begins to change with good think-pieces like the New York Times piece.    

BART’s safety culture slammed at Assembly hearing

Sasha Cuttler
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7

BART was slammed by legislators and its workers today for refusing to make a key worker safety improvement demanded by state regulators since a 2008 fatality, instead choosing to aggressively defend the “simple approval” process that contributed to two more fatalities on Oct. 19, after which the district finally made the change.

The Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment had already planned today’s San Francisco hearing into why BART spent years appealing rulings by the California Occupational Safety and Health Administrations before the recent tragedy, but that incident sharpened criticism of the district for valuing efficiency over safety.

“The culture of safety at BART must change,” said BART train operator Jesse Hunt, who gave dramatic testimony about the callous culture at BART that led to the Oct. 19 tragedy. “It’s not a single incident, it’s a pattern of disregard for safety.”

The hearing also delved into why BART had an uncertified trainee at the helm of the train that killed Christopher Sheppard and Laurence Daniels on Oct. 19, despite warnings by its unions that district preparations to run limited service during the strike would be unsafe.

“Simple approval” made employees doing work on the tracks responsible to avoid being hit by trains moving silently at up to 80mph. When BART exhausted its administrative appeals of Cal-OSHA’s rulings in June, it filed a lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court and continued to defend the practice, which its unions had long sought to end. 

“BART challenged that citation and continues to do so to this day,” Chair Roger Hernandez (D-West Covina) said in his opening remarks, noting that it took two recent fatalities for BART to drop its stance. “I’m deeply troubled this decision wasn’t made much earlier.”

For BART, the hearing only went downhill from there as state regulators testified to the district’s litigious refusal to adopt important safety precautions, employees painted a picture of a district hostile to them and their safety concerns, and legislators chastised BART managers for not having reasonable answers to their questions.

In response, BART Assistant General Manager of Operations Paul Oversier denied the district undervalues safety and said that it defended the simple approval process because it had been used tens of thousand of times and, “We had a track record in mind of a procedure that was working well.”

Asked whether he continues to defend it after the Oct. 19 incident, Oversier said, “Irrespective of what our opinion might be, we suspended the simple approval process,” a decision that he said could disrupt service, increase costs, and “that may cause us to look at what our hours of operation are.”

That suggestion drew murmurs of outrage from the union members that packed the hearing, including those who had just testified about how the district refuses to work collaboratively with its workers, who even had to learn of the district’s decision to end simple approval from evening news reports rather than directly.

“Shifting the burden from people in the field to the control center is not a long term solution,” testified Sal Cruz, a BART train controller of 15 years who was on the contract bargaining team. “Time and time again, we’re never really involved in these decision-making processes.”

Christine Baker, director of the Department of Industrial Relations, and Juliann Sum, acting director of its Division of Occupational Safety and Health (better known as Cal-OSHA), testified as to their agency’s long, trying history of getting BART to comply with its rulings, with Baker calling the resistance to reform “clearly an issue of grave concern.”

Legislators probed why that might be the case, asking whether abating the problems might be seen as an admission of liability to either the agency and a victim and whether it was the norm for those cited. Baker said no to both questions: “It is not an admission of guilt if they abate…Many employers abate as soon as there is a citation.”

So why is it standard practice at BART to avoid correcting the 40 violations it received from Cal-OSHA in the last 12 years?

“In most cases, the district has acted in good faith to try to abate the citations,” Oversier testified, but he said that BART often disagreed with Cal-OSHA’s findings and that “the investigation doesn’t really start until you appeal.” He said BART has paid just 22 percent of what it has intially been fined by OSHA, casting that as smart stewardship of ratepayer money and saying, “It’s the appeal process that brings closure to the process.”

Meanwhile, Baker, Sum, and Cal-OSHA attorney Amy Martin said they are currently investigating the Oct. 19 incident for both civil violations and penalties and the possibility of criminal prosecution of BART officials if “they intentionally took the action that led to the fatality,” Martin said.

The hearing was called by Assemblymember Phil Ting, D-SF, who said in his opening remarks, “I was very concerned to read many of the OSHA findings, that it found BART was in violation of California state law,” which prohibits employers from making workers responsible for their own safety in dangerous situations. 

Later, Ting questioned BART Chief Safety Officer Jeff Lau — whose testimony came almost entirely from prepared statements he read, in a way that didn’t inspire much confidence in the material — about how many of OSHA’s safety violations it had taken steps to correct versus how many it continues to resist. Lau said that he couldn’t answer the question, even though Ting noted that he first called this hearing back in June and Lau should have been prepared to answer that central question.

“I’m extraordinarily disappointed in your response,” Ting told Lau, demanding that he prepare a detailed written response to the questions and submit it to the committee, which plans to revisit the issue once more details emerge from the NTSA investigation of the Oct. 19 incident.

Most of the panel criticized BART’s foot dragging and called for reforms.

“This latest accident, a terrible tragedy, could have been avoided,” said Assemblymember Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont), decrying Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent veto of Assembly Bill 1165 by Assemblymember Nancy Skinner (D-Oakland), which would have expedited Cal-OSHA appeals and perhaps required BART to fix the problems pending its appeal.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (S-SF) recounted his own history of difficult dealings with intransigent BART officials, from trying to improve station safety when he was a supervisor starting in the mid-‘90s to his work as a legislator trying to provide some oversight of the BART Police after the Oscar Grant shooting.

“I feel like it still has a long way to go. Transparency and accountability will be very important around this issue,” Ammiano said.

Later, Ammiano asked Cruz whether the ill-fated Oct. 19 train should have been traveling slower than 60-70mph, and Cruz responded, “With knowledge of people being wayside [a term that means on the tracks], you would think that.”

The most scathing and dramatic testimony came from the nine workers called to testify at the hearing, three from each of BART’s three unions, all of which had made safety reforms a big part of their recent contract negotiations, with varying degrees of success.

“We are dealing with a culture at BART that doesn’t take workers seriously or the safety of workers seriously,” began AFSCME District Council 57 Executive Director George Popyack. “Our objective today is to make BART a better and safer place to work.”

Several workers said the district’s main imperatives are to cut costs and keep the trains on time, which causes safety compromises on an almost daily basis. “We’re so pushed to keep that schedule sometimes we push on the edge,” said train controller Ken Perez. 

While BART officials refused to discuss details of the Oct. 19 incident, as per a gag order from the NTSB, union members that testified said it’s clear that the district’s disregard for safety and its desire to break the strike are what led to the tragedy.

“BART was planning to run a limited service with people not trained to run those trains and that was connected to this accident,” ATU Local 1555 President Antonette Bryant testified.

“The train that hit the workers was a manager being trained to run the train in the event of an extended strike,” Poyyack said, noting how irresponsible it was to be running a train at what the NTSB said was 60-70mph on the one line where there were workers on the track. He and others said there was no good reason for the district to do so, calling it an example of the district’s flagrant disregard for safety.

“The culture of BART is a significant contributor to the incident,” said BART train operator Jesse Hunt. “The culture is one of gambling with worker and rider safety.”

Hunt said BART’s safety culture directly caused the Oct. 19 tragedy: “There was no reason for a trainee train to be operated or for employees to be on the ground.”

John Arantes, president of the BART Professional Chapter of SEIU Local 1021, said the district took an extremely aggressive posture in labor negotiations — “a scorched earth strategy encouraged by directors like Zachary Mallet,” the newest elected member and one critical of unions in the press — forcing the strike and the unnecessary Oct. 19 tragedy.

And he posed a question that remains unanswered, despite the hearing and the Guardian’s attempts to get an answer: “Who authorized the training exercise and to what extent were the BART directors involved?”

Hearing to probe safety at BART and issues related to recent tragedy

Sasha Cuttler
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10
Hearing to probe safety at BART and issues related to recent tragedy

The Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment will hold a hearing in San Francisco tomorrow (Thu/7 at 10am) looking at workplace safety issues in the BART system, one initially prompted by the district’s record of unaddressed safety violations, but which took on special resonance when two BART workers were killed on the tracks on Oct. 19.

Assemblymember Phil Ting called for the hearing back in June, but he postponed it until the district resolved a protracted contract impasse with its three unions that resulted in two four-day strikes this year, with an agreement finally reached two days after the tragedy — and at least partially prompted by it.

Ting told the Guardian that he was motivated by dozens of violations from the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration that the district has received since its last fatality in 2008 — which were highlighted by the unions and reported by us — and the fact that “BART ended up appealing them instead of going to fix them.”

“It’s so unfortunate that we have this tragedy, which will create a greater sense of urgency on this issue,” Ting said, noting that he wants to focus on, “How do we move forward and fix these problems?”

Beyond those safety issues lurk another important issue that we at the Guardian have been raising, but which most journalists have ignored and the district has tried to avoided addressing: Was the district ignoring safety concerns by its unions to train replacement drivers on that ill-fated train, and did its preparations to run limited service during a strike harden its negotiating stance and force the strikes and ultimately the tragedy?

It may be many months before the National Transportation Safety Board investigation arrives at conclusions about what caused the fatalities, but it has already said that a trainee was at the helm at the time. Although the NTSB has told the district not to publicly discuss the accident, that doesn’t cover the labor negotiations that led up to it, and the Guardian has finally been able to get some responses from the district to our questions (below, you can find an extended exchange between me and BART spokesperson Alicia Trost), but key questions remain unanswered.

Will tomorrow’s hearing illuminate the connection between the labor impasse and the tragedy? “We’ll have to touch on some of it,” Ting told us. “But I’m not sure what they’ll say.”

BART Board President Tom Radulovich discussed the issues with the Guardian, and he cautioned about any rush to judgement about the cause of the Oct. 19 accident and whether it was connected to preparations that the district was making to possibly offer replacement service, which the board would have had to approve.

Although he said the board was briefed by district officials about the possibility of offering service, Radulovich said he didn’t consider the idea feasible and that “a lot of directors had misgivings about even the possibility of running replacement service.”

Radulovich also defended the eventual deal as resulting from compromises on both sides and not simply the district sweetening its offer and dropping some of its work rule demands — which the unions had blamed for the Oct. 17 breakdown in negotiations — and “I don’t think [limited replacement service] would have broken a strike.”

But SEIU Local 1021 Political Director Chris Daly, who was part of the union’s negotiating team, said the district was “bargaining toward a strike” all year and that the threat of running replacement service was taken seriously by the unions, all of whom warned the district it would be unsafe.

“We would have lost this fight if they had put limited service on,” Daly told us, noting how that would have allowed the district to weather a strike long enough to break the will of union members.

Daly also disputes the district’s characterization that relaxed work rules demands by the unions settled the impasse, telling us, “In the end, the deal was a little more compromise on substance, but not as much as that would have occurred in the binding arbitration that we proposed before the strikes.”

The district rejected that offer, setting the stage for the latest strike, and Daly said the only reason why BART softened its stance was because the tragedy made BART realize its plan to run replacement service was not longer a viable option: “There is not question in anyone’s mind that was the breakthrough.”

Both Radulovich and district officials insist there were no active plans to run replacement service, although BART spokesperson Alicia Trost made clear that the district had publicly raised that possibility and that training to that end was already underway at the time the tragedy.

Radulovich insists that the district wasn’t bargained toward a strike and that “we just wanted a balanced package.” But he also wasn’t at the bargaining table, and he says that he’s not aware of how much driver training had been done and whether it was being done on the ill-fated train in preparation for replacement service.

“I still have a lot of questions and I do want to see the facts,” Radulovich told us.    

We at the Guardian also still have a lot of questions, which Trost was dodging until just a few days ago, when my last blog post on the topic finally prompted a substantial response. So here’s our most recent email exchange:

 

SFBG: Who at the district proposed training replacement drivers and did the board approve that training?
Did the district discuss warnings from the unions that such training would be unsafe? Why was the decision made to go ahead with the training anyway?
Why did it take days for BART to admit a trainee was driving the train that killed those men? And wasn’t casting that train as solely on a maintenance run deceptive?
Does the district regret the decision to train replacement drivers?
What role did the tragedy play in BART’s decision to sweeten its final offer and end the strike?
Did anyone at the district discuss with Tom Hocke how running replacement service could help break a strike? Do you deny that running limited service would help to break a strike?
Did the possibility of running replacement service allow the district to take a tougher stance at the bargaining table? And did this tragedy help the district conclude that running such service wasn’t a viable option?
Can you characterize what you meant by an “extended strike” and explain why training took place immediately at the onset if the strike?

 

BART: The District wanted a plan in place to run limited train service in the event of a prolonged strike.  The intent was never to replace workers, as our workers would be welcomed back once a strike ended, but to provide some limited congestion relief if the Bay Area was faced with a long, crippling and economically devastating strike. 

If the district was going to provide this limited service for the public it would need more certified managers which is why we were training. At the same time we were negotiating in good faith and trying to prevent a strike from happening in the first place. Our priority was always to get to a deal and avoid an unnecessary strike.  Once the unions went on strike for the second time we continued to negotiate and leave the door open for a deal. Which is exactly what happened. A deal came together and BART never needed to go to the board with a limited train service plan. Safety is always our top priority and is always the first, second and third consideration in everything we do. 

The NTSB immediately put a gag order on BART officials just hours after the tragic deaths, which remains in place today. Only the NTSB can provide information surrounding the incident. The NTSB announced the train was being used for both maintenance and training purposes. Under the gag order, BART is allowed to site what the NTSB has reported to date. 

The tragedy certainly redoubled everyone’s efforts to get to a deal.   The breakthrough came when the unions presented language on Beneficial Past Practice on Sunday night. This opened the door to continue to work off the progress that had been made on the economic components with the mediators just days before and resolve the remaining issues. 

 

SFBG: Thanks for finally getting back to me, but I don’t think you directly answered any of the questions that I posed.

 

BART: Did BART management consider the warnings (include one in the form of a

lawsuit) that running that service was unsafe?  Safety is always our top priority and is always the first, second and third consideration in everything we do.

And did the tragedy reinforce that safety question and signal to the district that running trains during a strike was probably unwise and that the district should sweeten its contract offer?

We have to run trains during a strike to exercise the system (details sent in a earlier email.) If you are talking about running passenger service, we never needed to move forward with such a plan as we were not faced with a prolonged strike.  The tragedy certainly redoubled everyone’s efforts to get to a deal.   The breakthrough came when the unions presented language on Beneficial Past Practice on Sunday night. This opened the door to continue to work off the progress that had been made on the economic components with the mediators just days before and resolve the remaining issues.

Who at the district proposed training replacement drivers and did the board approve that training?

The Operations Department was conducting the training as publically discussed by Paul Oversier to the MTC and to the media.  The board does not need to approve training.  (on background: I do not know if or who officially “proposed it.”  The first I learned of the concept was the MTC meeting.)

Did the district discuss warnings from the unions that such training would be unsafe? Why was the decision made to go ahead with the training anyway?

Safety is always our top priority and is always the first, second and third consideration in everything we do. The District wanted a plan in place to run limited train service in the event of a prolonged strike.

Why did it take days for BART to admit a trainee was driving the train that killed those men? And wasn’t casting that train as solely on a maintenance run deceptive?   

During the press conference immediately following the accident, a reporter asked where the train was going.  Mr. Oversier explained the train had just dropped off the graffiti train and was headed back to Concord.  He said he didn’t know who was driving the train as he had just arrived to the scene. The NTSB immediately put a gag order on BART

officials just hours after the tragic deaths, which remains in place today. Only the NTSB can provide information surrounding the incident. The NTSB announced the train was being used for both maintenance and training purposes. Under the gag order, BART is allowed to site what the NTSB has reported to date, which is why we can now point out the fact the train was both a training train and a maintenance/inspection trains we routinely run during strikes to exercise the system and deploy staff to assignments.
Does the district regret the decision to train replacement drivers?

This is a difficult question to answer without a summary of findings from the NTSB.
What role did the tragedy play in BART’s decision to sweeten its final

offer and end the strike?

The tragedy certainly redoubled everyone’s efforts to get to a deal.   The breakthrough came when the unions presented language on Beneficial Past Practice on Sunday night. This opened the door to continue to work off the progress that had been made on the economic components with the mediators just days before and resolve the remaining
issues.

Did anyone at the district discuss with Tom Hocke how running replacement

service could help break a strike?

No, the intent was to provide some contingencies for the travelling public being adversely impacted by the unions decision to strike.  

Do you deny that running limited service would help to break a strike?

The intent was never to replace workers, as our workers would be welcomed back once a strike ended, but to provide some limited congestion relief if the Bay Area was faced with a long, crippling and economically devastating strike.  Skeletal service would never be able to replace BART’s normal operation but it could provide a tiny bit of
congestion relief to the public.  BART’s bargaining team was always focused
on getting a deal with union leadership- one that would be approved by the
workers as well.

Did the possibility of running replacement service allow the district to take a tougher stance at the bargaining table? And did this tragedy help the district conclude that running such service wasn’t a viable option?

Our priority was always to get to a deal and avoid an unnecessary strike. Once the unions went on strike for the second time we continued to negotiate in good faith and leave the door open for a deal. Which is exactly what happened. A deal came together and BART never needed to go to the board with a limited train service plan.

Can you characterize what you meant by an “extended strike” and explain why training took place immediately at the onset if the strike?

There was never an exact time period placed on what an “extended strike” would be, but
union leadership indicated publically they were prepared for a month long strike which would be the “longest and bloodiest strike” we’ve ever seen. We began initial training weeks before the strike- as widely covered by the media.  If the district was going to provide limited service for the public it would need more certified managers than we had.

 

 

 

Media let BART slide

Michael Redmond
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Media let BART slide

BART continues to stonewall important questions about whether it was training scab drivers to break the recent strike by its unions when its trainee-driven train killed two workers on Oct. 19 — a stance made possible by the failure of the mainstream media to connect the dots or correct the anti-union bias that characterized its coverage of this long labor impasse.

Local journalists have failed to highlight the connection between that tragedy and the subsequent decision by the district to suddenly soften its stance and sweeten its offer, within hours of the National Transportation Safety Board revealing that a trainee was driving and that BART’s “maintenance run” story was a deception.

Local media outlets did dutifully report that a trainee was driving, but they failed to point out to readers and viewers the significance of that disclosure or ask the district whether the training was intended to break the strike and whether that plan fed the district’s hardline bargaining stance.

We have asked those questions of the district, and when we got misleading obfuscations, we asked again and again, and our questions are still being largely ignored. And here’s why they matter: Because if the district was planning to run trains during the strike, it reinforces the unions’ contention that the district forced a strike that it was preparing to break, a plan that became untenable when two people died, just as the unions warned might happen if the district ran trains without experienced drivers.

BART spokesperson Alicia Trost did finally confirm to us that, “BART has been training some non-union employees to operate limited passenger train service in the event of an extended strike if so authorized by the Board of Directors,” but she and BART Board President Tom Radulovich have each ignored our follow-up questions and requests to discuss this is greater detail.

This should be a huge scandal, the kind of thing that might force General Manager Grace Crunican to resign and BART directors to lose their seats — except for the fact that the media are ignoring this simple, obvious narrative and failing to do their job.

The East Bay Express, a rare exception on the local media landscape, published an excellent article on Oct. 30 about how the San Francisco Chronicle and Bay Area News Group (which includes the Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, and San Jose Mercury News) misled the public about the BART standoff.

Not only have these daily newspapers written some truly atrociously anti-worker editorials, but even the supposedly objective news stories have been clearly biased in their emphasis and omissions, including the current failure to demand accountability.

But this could backfire considering the truth will probably come out eventually, even if it’s long after the media spotlight has moved on. NTSB investigations can take up to a year, but they are remarkably thorough and it will probably eventually discuss why these drivers were being trained.

The Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment announced on Oct. 29 that it will also hold a hearing to “get to the bottom” of the tragedy, and one can only hope that someone on that committee will grill the district about its intentions in running that ill-fated train and conducting new driver training just one day into the latest strike.

Go vote! And then go party!

Sasha Cuttler
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Go vote! And then go party!

It’s been quiet at the polls for today’s election with just a few more hours until they close. Although the Department of Elections predicted a 35 percent turnout, it’s possible that San Francisco could vie for the historic low turnout of just under 23 percent.

If you’re still heading to the polls and don’t know how to vote, read our endorsements, and then check back here later tonight to see what happened. The only real drama tonight is surrounding Props. B&C, which would authorize the 8 Washington waterfront luxury condo project.

I’ll be reporting from the No on B&C campaign party being held at 443 Broadway (formerly Club 443), Rebecca Bowe will covering the Yes on B&C party at Coqueta on Pier 5, and our resident tech geek Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez will be at Guardian HQ compiling our tweets (@sfbg) and others here on the Guardian Politics blog and making it look all pretty for y’all.

The pickings are a little slim for our usual list of election night parties, but the others that we know about are Treasurer Jose Cisneros, who will be at Beaux (2344 Market) from 6-9pm, and the Yes on D party at the 03 Bistro & Lounge, which will supposedly be packed with politicos supporting cheaper drugs. Yay cheap drugs! 

Mayor Ed Lee’s committee gives $10,000 that it doesn’t have to the 8 Washington project UPDATED

Sasha Cuttler
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Mayor Ed Lee’s committee gives $10,000 that it doesn’t have to the 8 Washington project UPDATED

Mayor Ed Lee presents himself as a model of fiscal responsibility, but the Mayor Ed Lee for San Francisco Committee that he controls has recently been spending big money that it doesn’t have, including more than $10,000 that it has recently given to the Yes on Propositions B&C campaign, according to campaign finance filings.

The Mayor Ed Lee for San Francisco Committee, a general purpose committee that Lee and its Treasurer Kevin Heneghan are jointly responsible for, made late contributions of $8,666.66 on Oct. 29 and $1,667 on Oct. 30 to San Franciscans for Parks, Jobs and Housing, Yes on Props. B&C, which supports the 8 Washington project. Lee’s committee also made a $4,333.34 contribution to the Yes on A campaign on Oct. 29.

The Lee committee’s contributions are actually small potatoes for the Yes on B&C campaign, which is spending more than $2 million to have voters green-light the project, most of it coming from the developer, Pacific Waterfront Partners, which kicked in late contributions of $450,000 on Oct. 28 and $250,000 on Oct. 24, bringing its total to about $1.8 million.

But what’s interesting about the Lee committee’s donations is that the final pre-election statement that it filed on Oct. 24 showed that it had just $1,208 in the bank and $26,886 in outstanding debts — most of that to Oakland-based EMC Research for polling it conducted during the Sept. 22-Oct. 19 period.

Neither Heneghan nor Lee responded to our calls for comment, and Lee doesn’t have any public events scheduled between now and election day on Tuesday, so details on this intriguing bit of deficit spending and what kind of polling work the mayor’s committee was doing remain a mystery. [UPDATE 11/5: Lee’s office deferred to Heneghan, who just emailed us this response: “As you know, political committee report filings are a snapshot in time. The Mayor Ed Lee for San Francisco ballot measure committee has received additional contributions since the most recent report that will be appropriately reported. All activity through the committee in support of ballot measures endorsed by Mayor Lee will continue to be appropriately reported as well.” We asked Heneghan whether he would disclose the donors, and we’re waiting to hear back.]

The Mayor Ed Lee for San Francisco Committee hasn’t reported raising any money this year, unlike last year when it raised about $400,000 from some of the city’s biggest establishment players, including Lennar Homes ($35,000), Committee on Jobs ($30,000), San Francisco Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth ($25,000 in basically a pass-through from venture capitalist Ron Conway), San Francisco Association of Realtors ($20,000), and the city’s police and firefighters’ unions ($10,000 each).

But how exactly could the Mayor Ed Lee for San Francisco Committee give $10,000 to the Yes on Props. B&C campaign if it didn’t actually have the money to cover the checks?

When we asked a source at San Francisco Ethics Commission about it, at first he was puzzled, and then he told us that while the committee is required to report late expenditures that it makes before the election, it isn’t required to report late contributions that it receives. That we won’t find out until its Form 460s are due Jan. 31, 2014.

So who really paid for Lee’s contributions to the Yes on B&C campaign, as well as more than $20,000 in polling work that Lee’s committee paid for? And what will our mayor do in return for the people who are digging his committee out of its debts?  

 

Zombies to attack City Hall! UPDATED

Sasha Cuttler
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We in the Bay Guardian newsroom have just received word of an impending zombie attack on City Hall. I repeat: Zombies are planning to attack City Hall this afternoon! [Updated coverage from the scene below]

Oh, wait, it looks like it’s actually going to be City College of San Francisco students and supporters — dressed as zombies and other Halloween creatures — that will be descending on City Hall around 4pm today (Thurs/31). Okay, maybe this isn’t as big a deal as an actual zombie attack, but it’s still newsworthy.

The faux-zombies came to see Mayor Ed Lee to demand that he stop supporting the state takeover of CCSF and that he stand up for local control over this important, low-cost educational institution. The San Francisco-elected college’s board of trustees’ powers were given to Special Trustee Bob Agrella, who was in turn appointed by the California Community College Chancellor Brice Harris.

At the rally Alisa Messer, CCSF’s local faculty union president, called for Lee to push for the board’s reinstatement.

“We’re calling on Mayor Lee to ask the state chancellor to restore democracy at City College,” Messer said, “We want our board restored next year. Not two years from now, not three years from now, next year!” 

She also called on the mayor to demand that Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges restore CCSF’s accreditation immediately.

Christine Falvey, the mayor’s spokesperson, wrote in an email to the Guardian that the mayor supports efforts to save CCSF — but only the ones he thinks will work.

“The mayor has said these are difficult times for the college, but that this is the time to commit to true reforms,” she wrote. “The mayor wants to focus his efforts on activities that will ultimately help the college stay open.” 

When asked if the mayor supported City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s lawsuit against the ACCJC meant to stop the closure of CCSF, she responded that the lawsuit may “go up and beyond” critical deadlines to save the college. The mayor has so far shown no support for any of the efforts to combat the ACCJC, despite multiple lawsuits against the accreditors as well as condemnation from the U.S. Department of Education of their practices.

The zombie march will began at 3:30pm, at the CCSF Downtown Campus, 750 Eddy Street, and hundreds of protesters arrived at City Hall around 4pm — to see if there’s anyone in City Hall with any brains.

 

 

The Guardian’s voter Clip-Out Guide

Sasha Cuttler
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So we’ve heard a little confusion — and even some amusing conspiracy theories — about why the Guardian’s regular voter Clip-Out Guide isn’t on our cover like it usually is in the issue before the election. Rest assured, loyal Guardian readers (and haters), it’s right there, along the bottom.

With only eight items on the ballot, and fairly minimal interest in all but two of those items, we didn’t think it made sense to devote our entire cover to the election (but check out our cool Death Issue instead). Besides, it was only a month ago that we did devote the whole cover to the hottest items on the ballot, Props. B&C.

But in the interests of tradition, let me reinforce, here and now, how the Guardian thinks you should be voting on Tuesday: Yes on Prop. A; No, no, no! on Prop. B; No on Prop. C; Yes on Prop. D; Dennis Herrera for City Attorney; Jose Cisneros for Treasurer; Katy Tang for D4 Supervisor; and Carmen Chu for Assessor.   

If you want longer explanations of our reasoning, read our full endorsements. And check back here on election night for some live blogging and tweeting of the results — that may also be in a more abbreviated form than in years’ past, but blame this lackluster election and not anything going on over here at the good ole Bay Guardian.

 

Media misses connection between BART tragedy and settlement

Sasha Cuttler
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Media misses connection between BART tragedy and settlement

BART continues to stonewall important questions about whether it was training scab drivers to break the recent strike by its unions when its trainee-driven train killed two workers on Oct. 19 — a stance made possible by the failure of the mainstream media to connect the dots or correct the anti-union bias that characterized its coverage of this long labor impasse.

The failure of local journalists to highlight the connection between that tragedy and the subsequent decision by the district to suddenly soften its stance and sweeten its offer — within hours of the National Transportation Safety Board revealing that a trainee was driving and that BART’s “maintenance run” story was a deception — is as myopic as it is appalling.

After all, the daily newpapers, television stations, and wire services did finally, dutifully report that a trainee was driving, even as they failed to point out to readers and viewers the significance of that disclosure or ask the district, “Why were you training drivers during a strike? Were you planning to offer service during the strike?”

We have asked those questions of the district, and when we got misleading obfuscations, we asked again and again, and our questions are still being largely ignored (actually, we just got a limited but important response, see below). And here’s why they matter: Because if the district was planning to run trains during the strike, it reinforces the unions’ contention that the district was hard-bargaining to force a strike that it was preparing to break, a plan that became untenable when two people died, just as the unions warned might happen if the district ran trains without experienced drivers.

This should be a huge scandal, the kind of thing that might force General Manager Grace Crunican to resign and BART directors to lose their seats — except for the fact that the media is ignoring this simple, obvious narrative and failing to do its job.

The East Bay Express, which today published an excellent article on how the San Francisco Chronicle and Bay Area News Group (which includes the Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, and San Jose Mercury News) mislead the public about the BART standoff, is the only other media outlet in the region to join the Bay Guardian in highlighting the relevant facts in this story.

Not only have these newspapers written some truly atrociously anti-worker editorials, but even the supposedly objective news stories have been clearly biased in their emphasis and omissions. Why else would they repeatedly emphasize a proposal by an obscure Republican member of the Orinda City Council to prohibit future BART strikes — a bit of election-related grandstanding that has no chance of passing in Democrat-controlled Sacramento — while failing to analyze why BART suddenly sweetened its offer beyond what Crunican said the district could afford?

But this could be a situation that backfires on local media managers considering that the truth will probably come out eventually, even if it’s long after the media spotlight has moved on. NTSB investigations can take up to a year, but they are remarkably thorough and it will probably eventually discuss why these drivers were being trained.

The Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment announced yesterday that it will also hold a hearing to “get to the bottom” of the tragedy, and one can only hope that someone on that committee will grill the district about its intentions in running that ill-fated train and conducting new driver training just one day into the latest strike.

UPDATE: As I was posting this story, I finally heard back from BART spokesperson Alicia Trost, who made it sound like preparations to break the strike weren’t news — even though it may be news to most newspaper readers.

“The District has publicly acknowledged, dating back to a September 13, 2013 Metropolitan Transportation Commission subcommitee meeting, that BART has been training some non-union employees to operate limited passenger train service in the event of an extended strike if so authorized by the Board of Director. The Board was never requested to authorize revenue service during the strike,” she wrote by email.

Yet those public aknowledgements don’t appear to have made it to the public. And when the Chronicle’s Matier & Ross did run an anonymously sourced item breaking the news that BART may be training replacement drivers, BART refused to comment, the duo soft-peddled the scoop, and the relevation failed to make it into the larger narratives the newspaper offered about BART.

And even now, Trost followed up her admission by minimizing its importance, saying that the ill-fated train was also being run for maintenance purposes, which the NTSB had also reported.

“BART has to ‘exercise the system’ by running trains on the tracks to prevent rust build up. Rust can build up quickly and will interfere with train service. BART continued to run inspection trains throughout the entire strike just as it did during the July strike,” she wrote.

But the real issue is whether the district deliberately triggered two strikes that the heavily impacted public angrily blamed on workers, thanks largely to how the standoff had been cast by the mainstream media and the district. After all, BART chose a notoriously anti-union labor consultant as its lead negotiator, a decision that even Willie Brown criticized in his Sunday column, although Brown cast the district as just dumb instead of intentionally forcing a strike.

I’m still waiting for Trost to answer my follow-up questions, and I’ll update this post if and when I hear back. I’m also still waiting to hear from BART Board President Tom Radulovich, whose progressive credibility has been tarnished in the eyes of some for playing such a lead role in BART’s media strategy.

Thankfully, the divisive standoff between BART and its unions seems to be over, but the questions about what really drove it and how its conclusion came about are still relevant and largely unanswered. And that says a great deal about the state of journalism today.

Shit happened (Oct. 23-29)

Sasha Cuttler
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Shit happened (Oct. 23-29)

Tenant proposals and Guardian forum address eviction crisis

Tenant advocates have proposed a sweeping set of legislative proposals to address what they’re calling the “eviction epidemic” that has hit San Francisco, seeking to slow the rapid displacement of tenants by real estate speculators with changes to land use, building, rent control, and other city codes.

“In essence, it’s a comprehensive agenda to restrict the speculation on rental units,” Chinatown Community Development Center Policy Director Gen Fujioka told the Guardian. “We can’t directly regulate the Ellis Act [the state law allowing property owners to evict tenants and take their apartments off the rental market], but we’re asking the city to do everything but that.”

The package was announced Oct. 24 on the steps of City Hall by representatives of CCDC, San Francisco Tenants Union, Housing Rights Committee of SF, Causa Justa-Just Cause, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, UNITE HERE Local 2, Community Tenants Association, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

“San Francisco is falling into one of the deepest and most severe eviction crises in 40 years,” SFTU Director Ted Gullicksen said. “It is bad now and is going to get worse unless the city acts.”

The announcement came a day after the Lee family — an elderly couple on Social Security who care for their disabled daughter — was finally Ellis Act evicted from its longtime Chinatown home after headline-grabbing activism by CCDC and other groups had twice turned away deputies and persuaded the Mayor’s Office to intervene with the landlord.

But Mayor Ed Lee has been mum — his office ignored our repeated requests for comment — on the worsening eviction crisis, the tenant groups’ proposals, and the still-unresolved fate of the Lees, who are temporarily holed up in a hotel and still hoping to find permanent housing they can afford.

The package proposed by tenant advocates includes: require those converting rental units into tenancies-in-common to get a conditional use permit and bring the building into compliance with current codes (to discourage speculation and flipping buildings); regulate TIC agreements to discourage Ellis Act abuse; increase required payments to evicted tenants and improve city assistance to those displaced by eviction; require more reporting on the status of units cleared with the Ellis Act by their owners; investigate and prosecute Ellis Act fraud (units are often secretly re-rented at market rates after supposedly being removed from the market); increase inspections of construction on buildings with tenants (to prevent landlords from pressuring them to move); prohibit the demolition, mergers, or conversions of rental units that have been cleared of tenants using no-fault evictions in the last 10 years (Sup. John Avalos has already introduced this legislation).

“The evidence is clear. We are facing not only an eviction crisis but also a crisis associated with the loss of affordable rental housing across the city. Speculative investments in housing has resulted in the loss of thousands affordable apartments through conversions and demolitions. And the trend points to the situation becoming much worse,” the coalition wrote in a public statement proposing the reforms.

Evictions have reached their highest level since the height of the last dot-com boom in 1999-2000, with 1,934 evictions filed in San Francisco in fiscal year 2012-13, and the rate has picked up since then. The Sheriff’s Department sometimes does three evictions per day, last year carrying out 998 court-ordered evictions, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi told us, arguing for an expansion of city services to the displaced.

At “Housing for Whom?” a community forum the Guardian hosted Oct. 23 in the LGBT Center, panelists and audience members talked about the urgent need to protect and expand affordable housing in the city. They say the current eviction epidemic is being compounded by buyouts, demolitions, and the failure of developers to build below-market-rate units.

“We’re bleeding affordable housing units now,” Fred Sherburn-Zimmer of Housing Right Committee said last night, noting the steadily declining percentage of housing in the city that is affordable to current city residents since rent control was approved by voters in 1979. “We took out more housing than we’ve built since then.”

Peter Cohen of the Council of Community Housing Organizations actually quantified the problem, citing studies showing that only 15 percent of San Franciscans can afford the rents and home prices of new housing units coming online. He said the housing isn’t being built for current city residents: “It’s a demand derived from a market calculation.”

Cohen said the city’s inclusionary housing laws that he helped write more than a decade ago were intended to encourage developers to actually build below-market-rate units in their projects, but almost all of them choose to pay the in-lieu fee instead, letting the city find ways to build the affordable housing and thereby delaying construction by years.

“It was not about writing checks,” Cohen said. “It was about building affordable units.”

Discussion at the forum began with a debate about the waterfront luxury condo project proposed for 8 Washington St., which either Props. B or C would allow the developer to build. Project opponent Jon Golinger squared off against proponent Tim Colen, who argued that the $11 million that the developer is contributing to the city’s affordable housing fund is an acceptable tradeoff.

But Sherburn-Zimmer said the developer should be held to a far higher standard given the obscene profits that he’ll be making from waterfront property that includes a city-owned seawall lot. “Public land needs to be used for the public good.”

Longtime progressive activist Ernestine Weiss sat in the front row during the forum, blasting Colen and his Prop. B as a deceptive land grab and arguing that San Francisco’s much ballyhooed rent control law was a loophole-ridden compromise that should be strengthened to prevent rents from jumping to market rate when a master tenant moves out, and to limit rent increases that exceed wage increases (rent can now rise 1.9 percent annually on rent controlled apartment).

“That’s baloney that it’s rent control!” she told the crowd. (Steven T. Jones)

Students fight suspensions targeting young people of color

Sagging pants, hats worn indoors, or having a really bad day — the list of infractions that can get a student suspended from a San Francisco Unified School District school sounds like the daily life of a teenager. The technical term for it is “willful defiance,” and there are so many suspensions made in its name that a student movement has risen up against it.

The punishment is the first step to derailing a child’s education, opponents said.

Student activists recognize the familiar path from suspensions to the streets to prisons, and they took to the streets Oct. 22 to push the SFUSD to change its ways. Around 20 or so students and their mentors marched up to City Hall and into the Board of Education to demand a stop of suspensions over willful defiance.

A quarter of all suspensions in SFUSD for the 2011-12 school year were made for “disruption or defiance,” according to the California Department of Education. Half of all suspensions in the state were for defiance.

When a student is willfully defiant and suspended, it’s seen as a downward spiral as students are pushed out of school and onto the streets, edging that much closer to a life of crime.

“What do we want? COLLEGE! What are we gonna do? WORK HARD!” the students shouted as they marched to the Board of Education’s meeting room, on Franklin Street.

They were dressed in graduation gowns of many colors, signs raised high. They smiled and danced and the mood was infectious. One driver drove by, honked and said “Yes, alright!” Assorted passersby of all ethnicities cheered on the group. The students were from 100% College Prep Institute, a Bayview tutoring and mentoring group founded in 1999 aiming to educate students of color in San Francisco. Their battle is a tough one. Though African American students make up only 10 percent of SFUSD students, they accounted for 46 percent of suspensions in 2012, according to SFUSD data. Latinos made up the next largest group, at 30 percent. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

Techies to NSA: Stop spying on us!

Thousands of privacy and civil liberties activists, including many from the Bay Area, headed to Washington DC for an Oct. 26 rally calling for surveillance legislation reform, in response to National Security Agency spying programs. It was organized by more than 100 groups that have joined together as part of the Stop Watching Us coalition. The group has launched an online petition opposing NSA spying, and planned to deliver about 500,000 signatures to Congress. Many of the key drivers behind Stop Watching Us, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to Mozilla, are based in San Francisco. (Rebecca Bowe)

Let’s talk about death

Sasha Cuttler
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Let’s talk about death

steve@sfbg.com

DEATH ISSUE  Death comes for all of us, sometimes with advanced warning, other times suddenly.

Loved ones get a chance to say goodbye in fewer than half of all deaths, so I was fortunate to see my 92-year-old Grandma Elinor Bonin in the week between her massive heart attack and her passing on Oct. 7. And I was doubly lucky to catch her while she was still fairly stable and lucid, before she went downhill, wracked by pain, fighting for each breath, and wishing for the relief of death.

Her health had been deteriorating for years and she was ready to die, as she told me in her room at Sierra Vista Hospital in San Luis Obispo, the same hospital where my daughter Breanna and I were each born.

Grandma was already suffering from pneumonia and congestive heart failure when she had a massive heart attack in the early morning hours of Oct. 1. The prognosis wasn’t good, so she worked with my mom and others to craft an exit plan: creating an advanced care directive with do-not-resuscitate order, setting up home hospice care paid for by Medicare, and going home to die.

“I’m ready,” she told me — sweetly if wearily, with a resolute resignation in her voice — as we waited for the ambulance that would take her home from the hospital. “I just don’t want to live in agony anymore.”

We all want to believe that we’ll show that kind of grace, clarity, and courage as we greet death. Society is beginning to wake up to the realization that extraordinary efforts to prolong life as long as possible can be as inhumane as they are costly, finally opening up a long-overdue conversation about death.

As we explore in this issue, the Bay Area is the epicenter for evolving attitudes towards the end of life, from the death midwives movement and home funerals to the complex discussions and confrontations of taboos now being triggered by the Baby Boomers facing death, both their parents’ and their own.

“The reality now is we’re kickstarting the conversation about death. We’re at the very beginning of this,” says San Franciscan Suzette Sherman, who just launched www.sevenponds.com, an information clearinghouse designed to elevate the end of life experience. “Death is a wonderful part of life, it’s a profound moment.”

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Read more about: death midwives, AIDS obit archives, passing pet care, and Death with Dignity in California

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We honor and celebrate death in San Francisco more than they do in most American cities. The AIDS crisis forced San Franciscans to grapple with death in once unimaginable ways. We continue to pioneer comforting passages with programs such as Hospice by the Bay and the Zen Hospice Project.

Our iconic Golden Gate Bridge has the dubious distinction of being the site of more suicides than any bridge in the world, with more than 1,200 people choosing to end their lives there, including 10 in August alone — a sad statistic considered local officials approved a suicide barrier in 2008, but they still have yet to find funding to build it.

Death Café salons that started in Europe have begun to catch on here, and from Latin America we borrowed and popularized Day of the Dead, which on Nov. 2 will fill the streets of the Mission District with thousands of people and Garfield Park with creative shrines to the dead.

“The way that we used to talk about death in the United States was as a sudden event. Now, it’s an anticipated event,” Death Café facilitator Shelly Adler told a small crowd that had assembled on Oct. 23 in the Great Room of the Zen Hospice Center. “The dying process is now thought of, not as something you can prevent, but as something you have a little control over.”

That’s what my grandmother had: a little control over her death, but not a lot. She was able to choose the place of her death, but not its time or manner, like she might have been able to do in Oregon or other places that allow the terminally ill to gather loved ones together and self-administer a lethal final cocktail.

death statistics

I was able to get some final quality time with this amazing woman before she passed, watching her light up at the memory of teaching me to ride a bike, laughing at the distant thought of running alongside her wobbly five-year-old grandson. And then she laughed again when I said that I still ride my bike everywhere I go, and that I even brought it down with me in the car I borrowed from my girlfriend because I don’t own an automobile anymore.

It was the last laugh she had, my mom told me later. The next day, propped up in a rental hospital bed in her living room, was when she really began the slow, arduous descent into death. The pain and morphine sapped her spirit and fluid steadily filled her lungs, slowly drowning out the last of her life.

But longevity runs in my family, and Grandma could have hung on for days or weeks like that. Her husband, my 97-year-old Grandpa Bonin, had suffered a similarly massive heart seven years earlier, also looking for awhile like his time had come, but he fought his way back and was healthy and strong as he sat by her bedside. You just never know.

So, with pressing deadlines at work and lots of other extended family members flying in to say their goodbyes to Grandma, I said mine on Thursday evening, Sept. 26.

Four days later, I got the call from my mom, a voicemail waiting for me as I returned from yoga class. I was struck by the fact that Grandma died almost at the precise moment that I was finishing my shavasana, coming out of my corpse pose as my grandmother was permanently going into hers. It’s left to the living to ponder confluences like that and to search for meaning within the mysterious expanse of death.

That’s been the central preoccupation of religions for centuries, offering assurances to the flock that we needn’t fear death, that it’s a natural part of life, a view that has been reinforced by modern secular society as well, from atheists to ecologists.

So let’s confront death, bring it out of the hospitals and mortuaries and into the open. Let’s have the long-overdue societal conversations about it that we need to have. Let’s talk about death. 

Janina Glasov contributed to this report.

 

 

 


Developer-funded 8 Washington campaign spends $1.8 million pushing Props. B&C

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The developer of the 8 Washington waterfront luxury condo project and his allies have spent more $1.8 million this year pushing Propositions B and C, according to new campaign finance filings with the San Francisco Ethics Commission.

San Franciscans for Parks, Jobs and Housing spent nearly $1 million in the latest Sept. 22 to Oct. 19 period, while raising $687,006 — bringing its year-to-date totals to $1.4 million raised and $1.8 million spent — and leaving the Yes on B&C committee $562,029 in debt.

But that “debt” is actually more like an investment considering developer Simon Snellgrove and his Pacific Waterfront Partners have contributed the lion’s share to this campaign, $1.1 million and counting, which is probably a pittance compared to the profits he plans to make on 134 condos that will go for around $5 million each.

By contrast, the opposition campaign, No Wall on the Northeast Waterfront, has raised $587,625 so far this year (almost half of that in the latest filing period) and spent $511,703 ($333,589 since Sept. 22), leaving the campaign with $88,553 in the bank as of Oct. 19.

Unlike the developer-funded campaign, whose only other significant financial support came from project contractor Cahill Construction, the opposition campaign was funded mostly by dozens of small contributions ranging from less than $100 up to a few $5,000 donations. Its only sizable checks came from Richard and Barbara Stewart of Stewart Economics, who live next door to the site and would have their bay views blocked by the 136-foot condo towers, which the couple has jointly kicked in $278,000 to try and stop.

For more information on 8 Washington and Props. B & C, read the Guardian’s endorsements (No on C; and No, no, no! on B) or listen to the interesting debate that KQED’s Forum hosted this morning. And don’t forget to vote. 

Tenant groups propose sweeping package to ease the “eviction epidemic”

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Tenant advocates today proposed a sweeping set of legislative proposals to address what they’re calling the “eviction epidemic” that has hit San Francisco, seeking to slow the rapid displacement of tenants by real estate speculators with changes to land use, building, rent control, and other city codes.

“In essence, it’s a comprehensive agenda to restrict the speculation on rental units,” Chinatown Community Development Center Policy Director Gen Fujioka told the Guardian. “We can’t directly regulate the Ellis Act [the state law allowing property owners to evict tenants and take their apartments off the rental market], but we’re asking the city to do everything but that.”

The package was announced this morning on the steps of City Hall by representatives of CCDC, San Francisco Tenants Union, Housing Rights Committee of SF, Causa Justa-Just Cause, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, UNITE HERE Local 2, Community Tenants Association, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

“San Francisco is falling into one of the deepest and most severe eviction crises in 40 years,” SFTU Director Ted Gullicksen said. “It is bad now and is going to get worse unless the city acts.”

The package includes: require those converting rental units into tenancies-in-common to get a conditional use permit and bring the building into compliance with current codes (to discourage speculation and flipping buildings); regulate TIC agreements to discourage Ellis Act abuse; increase required payments to evicted tenants and improve city assistance to those displaced by eviction; require more reporting on the status of units cleared with the Ellis Act by their owners; investigate and prosecute Ellis Act fraud (units are often secretly re-rented at market rates after supposedly being removed from the market); increase inspections of construction on buildings with tenants (to prevent landlords from pressuring them to move); prohibit the demolition, mergers, or conversions of rental units that have been cleared of tenants using no-fault evictions in the last 10 years (Sup. John Avalos has already introduced this legislation).

“The evidence is clear. We are facing not only an eviction crisis but also a crisis associated with the loss of affordable rental housing across the city. Speculative investments in housing has resulted in the loss of thousands affordable apartments through conversions and demolitions. And the trend points to the situation becoming much worse,” the coalition wrote in a public statement proposing the reforms.

Evictions have reached their high level since the height of the last dot-com boom in 1999-2000, with 1,934 evictions filed in San Francisco in fiscal year 2012-13, and the rate has picked up since then. The Sheriff’s Department sometimes does three evictions per day, last year carrying out 998 court-ordered evictions, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi told us, arguing for an expansion of city services to the displaced.

At “Housing for Whom?” a community forum the Guardian hosted last night in the LGBT Center, panelists and audience member talked about the urgent need to protect and expand affordable housing in the city. They say the current eviction epidemic is being compounded by buyouts, demolitions, and the failure of developers to build below-market-rate units.  

“We’re bleeding affordable housing units now,” Fred Sherburn-Zimmer of Housing Right Committee said last night, noting the steadily declining percentage of housing in the city that is affordable to current city residents since rent control was approved by voters in 1979. “We took out more housing than we’ve built since then.”

Peter Cohen of the Council of Community Housing Organizations actually quantified the problem, citing studies showing that only 15 percent of San Franciscans can afford the rents and home prices of new housing units coming online. He said the housing isn’t being built for current city residents: “It’s a demand derived from a market calculation.”

Cohen said the city’s inclusionary housing laws that he helped write more than a decade ago were intended to encourage developers to actually build below-market-rate units in their projects, but almost all of them choose to pay the in-lieu fee instead, letting the city find ways to build the housing and thereby delaying construction by years.

“It was not about writing checks,” Cohen said. “It was about building affordable units.”

Last night’s discussion began with a debate about the waterfront luxury condo project proposed for 8 Washington Street, which either Props. B or C would allow the developer to build. Project opponent Jon Golinger squared off against proponent Tim Colen, who argued that the $11 million that the developer is contributing to the city’s afforable housing fund is an acceptable tradeoff.

But Sherburn-Zimmer said the developer should be held to a far higher standard given the obscence profits that he’ll be making from waterfront property that includes a city-owned seawall lot. “Public land needs to be used for the public good.”

Longtime progressive activist Ernestine Weiss sat in the front row during the forum, blasting Colen and his Prop. B as a deceptive land grab and arguing that San Francisco’s much ballyhooed rent control law was a loophole-ridden compromise that should be strengthened to prevent rents from jumping to market rate when a master tenant moves out, and to limit rent increases that exceed wage increases (rent can now rise 1.9 percent annually on rent controlled apartment.

“That’s baloney that it’s rent control!” she told the crowd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lee family quietly leaves home as activists pledge to push reforms

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Lee family quietly leaves home as activists pledge to push reforms

Members of Lee family quietly moved out of their longtime home in Chinatown last night, a day before their latest scheduled Ellis Act eviction, which had been postponed twice before thanks to headline-grabbing progressive activism that turned away deputies and persuaded the Mayor’s Office to intervene with the landlord.

But this time, the Mayor’s Office has been mum about the case (officials haven’t responded to our requests for comment) after failing to find a solution to the Lees – an elderly couple using Social Security to care their disabled 48-year-old daughter – still unresolved situation. With help from the Asian Law Caucus and Chinatown Community Development Center, the Lees moved their belongings into storage while they are staying in a hotel.

“The family is staying at a hotel in the city for the next few days as they try to finalize on a couple of potential rental units here. They’ll be paying over twice the amount that they had been paying for their rent-controlled unit. Their SSI won’t be enough to make ends meet, and so they will be spending down their relocation compensation, which may be depleted in the next several months,” Asian Law Caucus attorney Omar Calimbas told us. “Hopefully, the family will be able to find subsidized housing by then, or they will be in a precarious state of affairs again.”

Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi told us yesterday that he’s been waiting for word from the Mayor’s Office and hoping to avoid this evicting the family. “We’re duty bound. It’s a court order,” Mirkarimi said of his eviction obligation. “The eviction is on the books, but we’ve been expecting an alternative plan by the Mayor’s Office after he intervened in this case.”

The San Francisco Examiner, which had earlier given splashy credit to Mayor Ed Lee for stalling the Lee family’s eviction – to the irritation of some activists that probably deserve more credit than anyone in the Mayor’s Office – had the only journalist on the scene with the Lees last night, but the paper didn’t have any comments or updates from the Mayor’s Office.

Weeks before Mayor’s Lee’s headline-grabbing Sept. 25 intervention in the Lee case, Mirkarimi had his Eviction Assistance Unit contact the Lees and try to help them avoid being turned out with no place to go. But in a city where his office performs around 1,000 evictions per year – it executed 998 court-ordered evictions last year — the single full-time staffer in that office is overwhelmed.

“We need more staff to assist when it gets to this point,” Mirkarimi told us. But his budget request last year to add another position to the unit was denied by the Mayor’s Office and Board of Supervisors, a request that Mirkarimi renewed in a Sept. 30 letter to Mayor Lee.

“When there is a determination, our EAU attempts to support individuals and families facing eviction, not just Ellis Act evictions, but all evictions. This unit is comprised of one full time deputy sheriff and the partial time of another deputy.  Based on [the current eviction] trend, our EAU staffing is insufficient and ill-equipped to assist qualified individuals and families who may be at risk of becoming homeless,” Mirkarimi wrote. “With renewed focus on the consequences of evictions in San Francisco, I return to our FY 2013-2014 budget request to enhance our EAU with one full time clinical outreach worker.”

Meanwhile, the activists say they won’t wait for the next budget cycle or rely on the Sheriff’s Department for help with imminent evictions. They say that they plan to propose a package of reforms for dealing with the eviction crisis as soon as this week.

“Overall, the several weeks of reprieve from the eviction that were won after an incredible display of community solidarity with the Lees were very important in giving them time to find a temporary fix,” Calimbas told us. “Stay tuned in the next day or so for the next move by a growing coalition of community organizations, housing advocates and labor in pushing for a comprehensive package of legislative reform to curb the outbreak of displacement-based speculation.”

Guardian Staff Writer Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.

 

Gilded Age of Austerity breaks down

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It was a week when it seemed that civil society in the US was on the verge of collapse.

Most of the federal government was already shutdown when Congress came without hours of letting the US default on its debts, a fate avoided late on Oct. 16 with legislation to limp along for a few months before repeating the partisan budget standoff again.

That same day, both BART and the AC Transit were headed for strikes that would hobble the Bay Area’s transportation system after long contract impasses between workers and management. Gov. Jerry Brown then ordered a 60-day cooling off period for AC Transit, just like the one he imposed on BART that had just ended, leading BART to be shut down by a strike that started Oct. 18 (for more on BART, including what caused two fatalities in the system on Oct. 19, see related story).

It may not be the End of the World as We Know It (the title and subject of our 12/18/12 cover story), but this is a striking confluence of events that should cause us all to take stock of the things we take for granted, from reliable public transit systems to a functional federal government to the ability of politics to resolve our differences.

This era could be called the Gilded Age of Austerity, a duality marked by huge and growing concentrations of wealth for the few, but for the rest of us: increasing economic insecurity, a tattered social safety net, crumbling public infrastructure, and few signs of hope that things will get better.

Democracy is a fragile experiment that needs to be regularly reaffirmed by all sides. The US electoral system was already heavily skewed toward the interests of the wealthy, who sponsor both major political parties, to the point where many consider elections to be a sham. But there was still a political system, a basic framework for running the country even during tough times, and that seems to be breaking down.

For the radical right-wingers responsible for hobbling the federal government, this might appear to be a dream come true: Most of the regulators furloughed, funding for most social services stopped, and only the police state remained largely intact (86 percent of Department of Homeland Security employees were on the job and soldiers were still getting paid).

But these anti-government ideologues have never fully understood or appreciated the myriad things that government does to keep civil society functioning over the long term. Our economy relies on federal spending, our health relies on the CDC spotting coming epidemics and the FDA inspecting our food, justice needs a civil court system, our travels depend on roads, and our future depends on today’s young people getting educated (ie Head Start) and fed (ie Food Stamps), and that’s all come to a grinding halt.

It’s a similar situation with public employee unions, like those that operate BART trains and AC Transit buses. As we’ve reported (see “Last train,” July 9), private sector wages and benefits often rise or fall with those negotiated by unions. So when unions can’t win good contracts or maintain funded pensions for workers, we’re all dragged down.

The Gilded Age gets better for the bosses as the Age of Austerity gets worse for the workers.

BART’s unions had an understandable expectation that they would share in the agency’s recent budget surpluses, particularly after accepting wage and benefit concessions of $100 million over the last four years to help with projected budget deficits that never materialized.

BART managers argue that the district has offered enough and that the rest of the money is needed for its ambitious expansion plans, but there should have been a solution here somewhere short of ultimatums (strike vs. the district’s “last, best, and final offer”). When the center still held, before the new Gilded Age fused with the Age of Austerity, people of goodwill could find common ground.

Maybe we’ll pull ourselves back from the brink and learn our lessons. Or maybe we’ve entered the endgame, a place where the desperation of those living in the Age of Austerity finally matches the greed and self-interest of those living in the Gilded Age, where one must defeat the other to survive, like two fighting birds plummeting to the ground in a death spiral.

And if that’s the case, are we ready for the next era? Have we sown our seeds and tended our gardens? It took World War Two to really get us out of the Great Depression, and I’d like to think we’ve evolved since then. But given recent events I’m not so sure.

Homeless advocates fight Wiener on park closures

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Homeless advocates fight Wiener on park closures

The Coalition on Homelessness has launched a campaign to defeat Sup. Scott Wiener’s legislation to close down all city parks and most major plazas from midnight to 5am, which the Board of Supervisors is set to consider on Oct. 29. Activists are targeting three swing votes who could decide the controversial issue: Sups. London Breed, Norman Yee, and Katy Tang.

In an email blast to supporters, COH urged people to contact those three supervisors to raise their concerns, even suggesting a script that includes these arguments, “It further eliminates access to public space for all, it will displace homeless people, and is a waste of city funds.” [UPDATE: To protest the proposal, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club is hosting a “sleep-in” protest at Dolores Park tonight (Mon/28) starting at 9pm.]

COH Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach told the Guardian that she has the support of the four most progressive supervisors — John Avalos, David Campos, Jane Kim, and Eric Mar — and that she just needs two of the three swing votes that COH is targeting to kill the measure outright and avoid the kind of compromise that has become Board President David Chiu’s specialty this year.

She said the measure would be particularly harmful to the homeless LGBT community and other vulnerable populations that seek refuge at night in Golden Gate Park and other hidden spots, but that it’s bad for everyone. “It forces them out into the storefronts and streets and neighborhoods and nobody will be happy with that,” she said.

Wiener denies that the measure is aimed at the homeless, telling the Guardian that his intent is to address graffiti, illegal dumping, and damage done to park facilities overnight. “We’ve had an epidemic of vandalism in our parks and it’s getting worse,” Wiener told us. “It’s a significant problem and it absolutely degrades people’s ability to use the parks.”

Friedenbach said she appreciates that Wiener isn’t aiming his rhetoric at the homeless, even though she said that’s who will be most effected by it.

“It’s great in terms of not bashing homeless people, but we know every time something like this comes up, it increases public anger toward homeless people,” she told. And she notes that the measure is being trumpeted by people who do want to use it to go after the homeless, including Mayor Ed Lee, who went off script last month and told the Examiner that he hopes the measure will be a tool to clear the homeless from Golden Gate Park.

“The mayor said it was a great idea because we need to get the homeless people out of the park,” Friedenbach told us, noting also that, “Wiener has had a thing of going after homeless people.”

Wiener denies that this is about the homeless, and he responded to Lee’s comments by telling us, “I can’t speak for anyone else.” He also said that it’s already illegal to sleep in the parks and “to the extent the police want to do sweeps in the parks, they can already do so.”

The measure would apply the closing hours to all property controlled by the Recreation and Parks Department, which includes every city park and the city’s largest plazas, including Civic Center Plaza, Justin Herman Plaza, and Union Square.

“One thing people don’t think about is this also applies to the plazas,” Friedenbach told us. “A lot of our plazas are hangout spots late at night, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t be.”

Wiener said that small plazas, such as Harvey Milk and Jane Warner plazas in the Castro, aren’t under RPD jurisdiction and therefore aren’t effected by his legislation. And he said the ordinance was already modified to allow people to walk through the affected plazas without stopping, and that he’s open to further amendments.

As for his chances of success in the face COH’s activism on the issue, he told us, “I’m not sure what’s going to happen on the 29th.”

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