Tim Redmond

Newsom doesn’t need that money

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By Tim Redmond

Gavin Newsom does, indeed, have opponents this fall, but none of them are going to raise and spent a million bucks; in fact, none of them are going to make this enough of a race that Newsom will need to spend that kind of money. If he laid off his campaign staff today, never did a single rally, event or mailing and spent not a dime on his re-election he would win handily, probably with 60 percent of the vote.

So why does he need to run a $1.6 million campaign?

Answer: He doesn’t. Why not demonstrate some civic goodwill, Mr. Mayor, and donate, say, $1 million of that to charity?

UCSF gives city planning the royal salute

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By Tim Redmond

UCSF, which is developing a huge new campus at Mission Bay, wants to put a new research facility a few blocks away on Third Street. The Pritzker Center would focus on mental health for kids, and I’m all in favor of that. Of course, it involves turning a vacant warehouse into essentially office and clinical space, which may violate the city’s attempts to preserve blue-collar jobs in the southeast neighborhoods, but we may never hear any discussion of that issue, or of any other planning-related issues, and here’s why:

In a remarkable Fuck You to the entire city of San Francisco planning process, UCSF has essentially declared that it doesn’t have to abide by any city planning procedures at the site.

This isn’t even part of the Mission Bay campus, which is already zoned for UC’s use. In fact, UC doesn’t actually own the building. So by any normal standard, UCSF would have to apply to the city planning department for environmental review.

No such luck: The school has done its own review, determined on its own that there are no environmental issues, and told the city planners to kiss off.

Maybe the Pritzker Center is a fine use of that space, but it’s a scary precedent that could set the stage for UC expanding far beyond Mission Bay, taking other property and turning it to campus use — without any meaninful community input.

Sue Hestor is fighting the move; you can see her letter as a PDF here.

Manhattanization, from LA to SF

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By Tim Redmond

Joel Kotkin, the widely known urban writer and thinker, has a fascinating piece in the Sunday L.A. Times called “Why the Rush to Manhattanize L.A.?” I don’t entirely agree with his argument for L.A.; he writes about New York-style density and says:

It’s not so clear, however, that L.A., which has been expanding outward for more than 100 years and is famously sun drenched, car crazy, blessed with natural beauty and earthquake prone, should follow a similar course.

I think it’s clear that L.A. can’t continue to expand outward, and that it’s far too car crazy, and that future growth should be driven by transit, not freeways.

But his larger point is that we are so enamored these days of “new urbanism” and a rush to build tall buildings that we aren’t thinking about the long-term impacts:

Ultimately, it comes down to whether Los Angeles will have a serious debate about where it is headed. Jumping blindly on the Manhattan express, without considering the implications for the city and its many great neighborhoods, is not a promising first step.

In San Francisco, we’ve had this debate for years — but right now, as the Chronicle is arguing only about which of a group of oversized highrises is the best, we aren’t thinking clearly about why we’re making these decisions.

Daly will not run for mayor

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By Tim Redmond

Sup. Chris Daly, who was talking over the past few days about a campaign for mayor, has decided against it. He sent a statement tonight; I’ll post the whole thing:

Progressive Allies and Friends,

For the past 6.5 years, we have enjoyed strong
progressive politics in San Francisco. Progressive
San Francisco has delivered a new era of worker’s
rights with the nation’s highest minimum wage,
universal health coverage, and paid sick days.
Requiring significant amounts of affordable housing
and other public benefits, we’ve made development work
for communities. We’ve set the agenda on workers’
rights, housing, health care, city services,
transportation, and the environment. Our political
opponents, even holding the office of Mayor, have been
on the defensive.

Despite our political strength and its marquis
standing in local political races, it’s clear that
we’ve had difficulty engaging in this year’s Mayor’s
race. Progressives share a principled critique of the
personality-driven politics practiced by our
opponents. We elevate the issues important to
everyday people above our own political advancement
and personal self-interest. We are right to do so.
Unfortunately, this does not always translate well
into the mainstream and corporate-controlled media.

For the better part of a year, I felt a great deal of
responsibility to find a strong progressive candidate
for Mayor, all the while acknowledging that I was not
our best possible candidate. There were discussions,
caucuses, lunches, and even a Progressive Convention
aimed at compelling a progressive entry into the race.
With news last week of the final potential candidate
forgoing the race, I decided to take another look at
making a run.

This past week Progressive San Francisco produced a
flurry of activity about that possibility. I was
heartened and inspired that so many were willing to
step up in the face of significant odds. Dozens of
you dropped what you were doing to spend hours on end
with me this week. Hundreds pledged your support.
The outpouring gave me hope that we do have what it
takes to take back Room 200 and deliver social and
economic justice to San Francisco.

However, I have decided not to file a candidacy for
the Office of Mayor.

Given the negative, million-dollar campaign against me
last year, there was never a question that this
Mayor’s race would be brutal. The incumbent promised
as much in a meeting this week. Our ideas are better,
and I was committed to running a campaign about our
issues. But most of us had reservations about whether
we’d ever be able to achieve resonance on the issues
against the tide of hits, personal attacks, and media
hype of the Newsom vs. Daly personality clash.

Sarah and I arrived at last night’s meeting with the
intention of announcing my entry into the race and
were moved by everyone’s willingness to act on faith.
When I called on progressives for support for a
Mayoral run, progressives responded. But I also
sensed that the reservations in the room were real.
Progressives are certainly ready to vie for the
Mayor’s seat, but, unfortunately, I am not the right
candidate.

There is some good news. Progressives are much
stronger than we were the last time we didn’t field a
challenger for Mayor. Back in ’83, the progressive
movement had not recovered from the Milk/Moscone
assassinations and the subsequent repeal of district
elections. Dianne Feinstein enjoyed great popularity
after soundly squashing a recall effort. She went on
to easily win reelection later that year.

Four years later it appeared as if downtown’s reign
would continue with the front-running candidacy of
John Molinari. His bid, however, was upset when Art
Agnos united San Francisco’s left with a disciplined,
sustained, and effective campaign.

We all know that electoral work is just a part of the
overall effort we need to put forth. There is no
substitute for the basics of organizing and serving
our people so they can live with dignity. I will
always remain committed to the struggle and to
building progressive politics and people power in San
Francisco for the years to come.

Solidarity,

Chris Daly

It would have been a hell of a race, but I respect his decision. Now it’s time to focus on the Board of Supervisors races in 2008.

Halloween is cancelled. Go home.

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By Tim Redmond

So the mayor and Sup. Bevan Dufty have officially dropped the ball. They have decided to (more or less unilaterally) eliminate any sort of Castro Street celebration, but they have nothing to replace it with.

So what happens when a bunch of partiers still decided to go to the Castro and have fun? What if bar owners decide to defy Dufty and stay open that night? Will the cops come and round everyone up? Will they send in water trucks to hose down the celebration?

What do Dufty and Newsom think a few houndred thousand people are going to do on Halloween — stay home? Not likely.

A tough question for Hillary

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By Tim Redmond

I’m really glad Paul Hogarth of Beyond Chron got to ask Hillary Clinton a tough question at the YearlyKos conference. And I’m glad his excellent query got some media bounce. I still think this was a little over the top, but nobody who works at the Guardian should ever complain about a little self-promotion.

But what makes this so astonishing is that it’s even news in the first place. No discredit to Hogarth, and I’m not in any way minimizing his work or the importance of what he did, but why did it take a 29-year-old blogger from San Francisco to do what the high-paid, high-profile crackerjacks who are covering the presidential race for the mainstream media ought to be doing every day, as a matter of course?

The (privatization) wifi initiative

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By Tim Redmond

Sahsa at leftinsf has the full text of the mayor’s wifi initiative posted, and a phrase I hadn’t known about just leaps out:

(4) The City should initially provide the Wi-Fi Network through a public-private partnership that utilizes expertise of the high technology sector and minimizes financial risk to the City;

In other words, the mayor’s official declaration of policy (also signed by Sup. Aaron Peskin, who ought to know better) directly takes on and attempts to derail any type of municipal wifi service. The way Newsom is putting it out, we simply must privatize this piece of public infrastructure.

Nice work.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

John Ross has always known, as he says in this week’s cover story, that there’s a bullet out there with his name on it. Reporters who aren’t afraid to go where the news takes them, people who want to let the world know about deep injustice in parts of the world where most of us would never dare tread, risk their lives every day.

Brad Will was one of those people. He was an activist reporter in the grand old tradition, carrying a used video camera all over Latin America, drawn to the most explosive flash points, seeking images and stories. Often he paid his own way and posted his work for no wage on places like Indymedia.

He arrived in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the fall of 2006 to cover a violent strike by radical teachers. Will didn’t have the third-world street smarts that John has developed over a quarter of a century, but he was fearless — and when the bullet finally came for him, he filmed his own murder. John this week tells the story of how Will’s killers escaped prosecution — and he reminds us how popular it’s becoming to kill the messenger.

Apparently, you don’t have to be in a Mexican gunfight to fall victim to that sentiment either. Last week, the editor of the Oakland Post was assassinated; police now say the murderer was a worker at Your Black Muslim Bakery, an organization known for past violence that Chauncey Bailey was investigating.

Reporters in this country tend to think we’re pretty safe from the sorts of retributive violence common in other parts of the world. It’s rare that an American journalist is killed at home because somebody didn’t want a story told. But times are changing; more reporters are facing prison at the hands of the authorities, and now at least one local writer is dead, quite possibly on account of what he had to say.

Scary shit. *

The devil’s bargain at the Transbay Terminal

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By Tim Redmond

If you don’t like the notion of a 1,200-foot tower scarring San Francisco’s skyline — and I don’t — then maybe you ought to read this fascinating piece on Calitics, and stop for a minute to think about what this city, and this state, is doing.

Why do we have to live with a giant highrise office tower near the Transbay Terminal? Because if we don’t, there won’t be any money to build what should be the central transit link for the Bay Area, a landmark bus and train station on the scale (we’re told) of Grand Central in New York. It’s an essential part of the city’s future.

But the project costs a lot of money, almost a billion dollars — and nobody wants to pay higher taxes to fund this sort of thing. In fact, nobody in California wants to pay higher taxes for anything. So the folks at City Hall have decided that the only way we can have a new transit terminal is if we hock a piece of our city and our skyline to fund it. So we take some of the land on the terminal site and let a developer build a monstrosity of a highrise on it — and that will bring in the money that we can’t get any other way.

It ‘s the same reason we have that god-awful RIncon Tower sticking its ugly head into the sky: The developer offered to pay for a fair amount of affordable housing and other community amenities that the taxayers won’t fund because local government can’t raise taxes in California without reaching extraordinary lengths that are almost politically impossible. So here’s the deal: You want affordable housing? Give a big developer the rights to do something awful, and in exchange, we’ll get a few dollops of cash for civic needs.

Imagine, for a moment, what the state might look like if we’d had to cut this kind of deal to build the University of California system. You want nice colleges? Okay — sell off the coast and let it become a giant Miami Beach. You don’t want to do that? Too bad — no world-class university system for your kids.

This is the devil’s bargain we have agreed to settle for in 2007, and it sucks.

The wifi hoax

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By Tim Redmond

The mayor continues to push forward with his wifi plans, but check out this Mercury News piece on how Newsom-style programs aren’t working out so well in other places.

Should Daly run for mayor?

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By Tim Redmond

Sup. Chris Daly, who unequivocally was not running for mayor a few weeks ago, is now actually talking about it again. The journalist in me says that’s a wonderful idea – raise some issues, stir up a fuss, force Newsom to face a real challenger in a real debate …. Makes for great stories.

The San Francisco progressive in me is a bit more nervous.

Daly’s not going to win, not without some sort of stunning event. (Which is possible; I mean, Newsom could utterly melt down in October, start babbling incoherently, punch out Dan Noyes on camera, admit he was secretly funding the weapons procurement program at Your Black Muslim Bakery or something …. And Daly could suddenly find himself the front runner.)

But for all practical purposes, the point of a mayoral race would be twofold: To raise issues while holding Newsom accountable – and, equally important, to build momentum for the fall 2008 supervisorial races.

I can’t emphasize enough how important the 08 races are – control of the board, and the political agenda in the city, will be at stake. Tom Ammiano, Aaron Peskin, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval will be gone, victims of term limits. Ross Mirkarimi will be up for re-election, as will Sean Elsbernd. In four key open seats, the entire balance of power in the city could shift.

So the question is: Does Daly as a mayoral candidate help progressives win those seats by generating energy and organizing talent the way Ammiano’s 1999 race and Matt Gonzalez’s 2003 race did? There are, as I’ve pointed out before, some good things about a Daly for Mayor campaign. Or does Daly, who is not terribly popular outside his district, actually drag down progressive candidates by losing badly to Newsom and allowing the mayor’s forces to brand all the progressives as Daly-ites?

Can this race bring us all together as progressives, or just create more rifts?

If Daly wants to run, he’s got some work to do, because this, of course, is much bigger than him. And I think he knows that.

When Gonzalez decided to run four years ago, it seemed like a bit of a last-minute unilateral decision, and a lot of the activists in town felt left out. Daly’s got to do better: He needs to be sure that at least some of his progressive board colleagues (many of whom he’s been fighting with) will endorse him and help; running without any support from other progressive leaders would be tough. He needs to mend fences with some of his slightly bruised pals (which would be a good thing to do anyway).

He needs to line up some community backers and seasoned campaign workers who will sign on for the battle. He needs to think about how he’s going to raise money.

Of course, there are always surprises; state Sen. Carole Migden is in a big fight of her own, against Assembly member Mark Leno, and Leno is backing Newsom. Maybe Migden would support and raise money for Daly, who she’s been close to in the past (and who is supporting her over Leno). Which would make for an interesting political season.

But again, the question at hand is how will this benefit the progressive cause, not just now but over the long haul. Three days of hard thinking to go.

Free ice cream

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By Tim Redmond

Sasha at leftinsf has the right line on the mayor’s sudden move to put a nonbinding wifi measure on the ballot: The guy never approved of nonbinding resolutions before (he’s ignored Question Time), but now he wants one of his own. And it’s going to be so simple: Free wifi for all. Who can be against that? (As long as you don’t look at the details.)

Can Migden spend her money?

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By Tim Redmond

The Fair Political Practices Commission is investigating whether state Sen. Carole Migden violated campaign finance laws. That’s not the first time a local politician has been investigated and it won’t be the last, but this one has some odd and potentially very significant twists.

For one thing, Migden’s campaign manager admits that the charges are “absolutely legitimate.” And if one of the key allegations is true — that Midgen illegally transfered $1 million from an Assembly race account and another $500,000 from a Board of Equalizaton race account to her state Senate campaign coffers — then she may have a real problem. She may have to stop spending that money — if if she did that, her financial advantage over challenger Mark Leno would evaporate.

Wi-Fi on the ballot?

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By Tim Redmond

Here’s a classic Gavin Newsom idea: Since he can’t get the supervisors to sign off on a baldly flawed wi-fi plan (which the prime contractor may be ready to abandon anyway), there’s talk that the mayor will simply put his wi-fi plan on the ballot.

That way Earthlink and Google (if they still want to do this thing) can put up a bunch of money, and newsom can use it to claim he’s trying to get something done (and he can bash the supes a bit in the process) and the rest of us will have to spend a bunch of time and money fighting to stop a dumb idea from getting voter approval.

Wi-fi and Community Choice Aggregation; it could be the all-privatization ballot.

The homeless sweep won’t work

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By Tim Redmond

I came to San Francisco in 1981, and there were people sleeping in Golden Gate Park. Dianne Feinstein, who was the chief exec back then, would periodically try to get rid of them. Art Agnos and Frank Jordan did the same thing. At one point in the 1990s, when Willie Brown was mayor, he discovered the shocking fact as if for the first time, and had a team sweep the campers out. Now the Chronicle has gotten the scoop yet again, and the mayor has dispatched his shock troops and is trying it all anew.

It won’t work this time, either.

There simply aren’t enough places for homeless people to sleep in this town. The shelters are unpleasant and often dangerous, and don’t work for people who are opposite-sex couples (all the shelters are men- or women-only) or people who have dogs (and there are quite a few homeless people with dogs). They aren’t a long-term answer for people who drink or take drugs, since they’re all alcohol and drug-free (or are supposed to be).

The transitional housing the mayor is promoting is fine — but there are thousands of homeless people and not enough rooms for all of them. So if you sweep the park, you just get homeless people sleeping in doorways.

Mark Salomon had an interesting post on this on the PRO-SF listserv; you can read it after the jump.

McGoldrick lets us down

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By Tim Redmond

Jake McGoldrick was the swing vote on the wrong side on the 3400 Cesar Chavez project. Some interesting comments and debate here.

I don’t think McGoldrick is corrupt (as one commenter says at leftinsf), and I’m not going to support the attempt to recall him (as another proposes), but I’m deeply disappointed. McGoldrick is a housing guy; he knows better than this.

I live near 3400 Cesar Chavez, and the plan is terrible for the neighborhood. We could have stopped it, and opened the door to a real affordable housing effort. Damn.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There’s a new move afoot, this time through a lawsuit, to change the way taxicab permits work in San Francisco. Rachel Stern lays out the story on page 14, but allow me to offer a bit of political background:

The San Francisco cab industry works as a medieval class system. There are members of the landed gentry — people who have medallions, or operating permits — and there are serfs, people who drive cabs but don’t have permits. The serfs fork over a significant portion of their income every day to the gentry in the form of lease fees, the same way the peasants used to fork over much of their income for the right to live near a castle or hunt or farm on the gentry’s land. See, you can’t drive a cab without a permit, and if you don’t have one, you have to lease one from someone who does.

Drivers are all independent contractors, so they get no health insurance or disability and retirement benefits.

In this particular economic world, even the permit holders aren’t getting rich. The only ones who really make out are the top royalty, the cab companies themselves. But the gentry do a lot better than the serfs.

What’s interesting, though, and wonderful in its way, is that thanks to a 1978 law backed by that well-known Marxist former supervisor Quentin Kopp, you can’t inherit your way into the landed gentry. You can’t buy your way in, borrow your way in, or marry your way in. The only way to become a medallion holder is to put your name on a list and wait, along with all the other serfs, until, after 15 years or so, a permit opens up.

And the way a permits opens up is that someone who has one quits driving.

That’s the deal Kopp put together: only active, working drivers are supposed to get the benefits of the medallions. No corporations, no partnerships, no trusts, no relatives…. You personally drive a cab 800 hours a year, and you’re eligible to lease your permit out during those shifts when you’re not using it.

Of course, once a driver becomes a member of the landed gentry, he or she never wants to give up that permit. It’s free income, maybe worth $2,000 a month. The Medallion Holders Association desperately wants its members to be able to keep their permits when they retire, or be able to give them to their kids, or somehow cement them as property that a person can own, just like the forests and fields of the landed gentry of yore.

The latest issue is disability. Suppose you wait patiently for 15 years, suffering in serfdom, and your number finally comes up, and you get that golden ticket — and then you get in an accident and lose the ability to drive a car. I get the point; maybe there ought to be some transition program or something. But every time a nondriver gets to keep a permit, a serf waits even longer in line, forking over hundreds of dollars to a member of the gentry who doesn’t want to play by the rules anymore.

The bottom line is, cab permits belong to the city, and they aren’t supposed to be someone’s retirement fund. I don’t like any sort of rigid class system, but if you’re going to have one, the serfs deserve fairness too.<\!s>*

Senate energy bill helps nukes

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By Tim Redmond

The New York Times reports today that the Senate energy bill contains huge government subsidies for new nuclear power plants. This is no joke, folks: As we’ve been reporting in the Guardian, these folks are back. And they still lie.

Duuude — a top pot cop?

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By Tim Redmond

The Examiner’s having fun with front-page headlines today (“Better sit down for this — Muni removes benches”), but my fave is the interview with the co-chair of the Marijuana Offenses Oversight Committee. I’ve known Michael Goldstein, fomrer Harvey Milk Club president, for years, and I don’t think he ever expected to be called the city’s “Top Pot Cop.”

Why Gonzalez didn’t run

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By Tim Redmond

So it looks as if there won’t be much of a mayor’s race this fall after all. I know that Matt Gonzalez took a hard look at it; he met with a good campaign consultant, talked to possible supporters and donors, took a poll … and decided that he wasn’t going to win.

Gonzalez didn’t want to run a symbolic campaign. He didn’t want to do what Tom Ammiano did in 1999 — galvanize the left, build a movement, and fall short of dethroning a powerful incumbent. Gonzalez felt like he did that once, and if he was going to enter the race, he wanted to know there was a real chance of victory.

But Gonzalez has been out of politics for a couple of years, and has dropped a bit off the political radar. His “maybe-I-will-maybe-I-won’t” game over the past six months has demoralized a lot of possible supporters. And he couldn’t come up with a plan to crack Gavin Newsom’s teflon: The early numbers had him losing, 60-20.

It’s too bad. I still think that if Gonzalez had started early, say back in January, we might have had a real race. I understand his frustration: No matter how badly Newsom screws up — Muni’s a mess, the murder rate is soaring, he slept with a staffer who was married to his good friend — the mayor remains almost impossibly popular.

That, I think, could change with a real candidate challenging him — but it won’t be Matt Gonzalez. So it’s time to start thinking about the Board of Supervisors in 2008.

Bill Walsh. Bill Walsh. Bill Walsh

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By Tim Redmond

Last night, KTVU devoted 14 minutes at the top of the hour to the death of Bill Walsh. The Mercury News did a special eight-page section on him.

Okay, the guy was brilliant. I’ve been watching him since the 1970s, when poor Greg Cook threw out his arm trying to run a Walsh offense as a Cincinatti Bengals rookie. Walsh was one of the best coaches in NFL history, built one of he best teams in NFL history, recruited and trained the best quarterback in NFL history … but come on: he was a football coach.

There was other news this week, no?

Oooh, he’s toast

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By Tim Redmond

The Post Office has gotten into the Ed Jew story, and this looks very bad

No politics in the parks?

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By Tim Redmond

This is a fascinating tale, from Fog City Journal. It sounds like the Redevelopment Agency (officially, anyway) wants to call this all a misunderstanding, but I can see it becoming a much bigger problem if Newsom succeeds in privatizing more city parks.

Key housing vote on tuesday

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By Tim Redmond

The supervisors will vote Tuesday on whether to allow high-end condos and (another!) Walgreens in the Mission at 3400 Cesar Chavez. Leftinsf has a good summary of the issue. I live in the area, and I can tell you: the last thing we need are more condos for the rich and another damn Walgreens.

This is insanity; The site, like so many in the Eastern Neighborhoods, ought to be preserved for community-based affordable housing. There aren’t many places left to build housing of any sort, and every time you turn one of them over to the get-rich-quick speculators and developers, you lose a site for housing that would allow working people and families to stay in the city.

Sup. Tom Ammiano wants affordable housing on the site, and typically the supes defer to the district representative on these sorts of things. But this time, both Jake McGoldrick and Bevan Dufty may be leaning toward the developers.

It’s true that there isn’t, at the moment, a community alternative with the funding to move forward. But if the private developers take this site over, there never will be. It’s worth delaying the process to give affordable housing a chance.

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