Tim Redmond

Labor, racetracks and Indian gambling

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By Tim Redmond

The February presidential primary ballot may have not one but a series of initiatives that deal with tribal gambling, reports Calitics. A couple of tribes that want more slot machines are pushing the compacts they’ve negotiated with the guv. Labor, mostly UNITE-HERE, and Bay Meadows, which sees the casinos as a threat to horse racing money, are on the other side. Lots and lots of money could be tossed around. So the ballot could have a presidential primary, the question of legislative term limits, and a well-financed fight over Indian gambling. Anything else on the ballot may get blown away in all the wind.

Will Earthlink bail on SF?

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By Tim Redmond

Earthlink, which is negotiating a contract to provide WiFi to San Francisco, may be in the process of bailing out of the deal – and whatever the mayor’s office or anyone else may say, it has little to do with the supervisors demanding more benefits.

Earthlink’s CEO announced yesterday that the company is changing its strategy on municipal wi-fi, and now wants cities to promise to buy a certain amount of service before the company puts up its system.

According to Muni Wireless magazine:

EarthLink President and CEO Rolla P. Huff today identified “a lot of inherent goodness” in the municipal wireless market but acknowledged his company’s current approach to that market is not working. To insure a return on investment, he wants “municipal government to step up and become a meaningful anchor tenant on completion of a build.”

The system Earthlink and its partner, Google, are talking about building for San Francisco will have no “anchor tenant.” The city isn’t planning to buy a certain bulk amount of wi-fi use; basic, slow service would be free to people who can get the wi-fi signal, and faster premium service would be available for a fee.

“They had discussed with us at some point the idea [of the city as an anchor tenant] and we explained that San Francisco is not at this point in a position to be interested in that service,” Sup. Aaron Peskin, who has been involved in the talks with Earthlink, told us.

So if what San Francisco has in mind isn’t what Earthlink wants to sell, is the deal dead?

Ron Vinson, the head of the city’s Dept of Telecommunication and Information Services, told that he has no reason to believe Earthlink is pulling out and “we look forward to closing a deal with them.”

But it’s looking shaky right now – and if the project goes kaput, look for Mayor Newsom to try to blame the supervisors for wanting to get the city a better deal.

Why gas costs so much

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By Tim Redmond

Just in case anyone out there is still wondering about the basic economics of the oil industry: When you raise the price of gas, the oil companies make more money. This has been true forever, and it’s true today.

Gee, why would all these refineries be off line at the same time? Why would supplies be so tight? Is it because of those rotten environmentalists — or do high gas prices and limited supplies actually make good business sense for Chevron?

Newsom runs terrified from Muni reform

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By Tim Redmond

Sup. Aaron Peskin has a new version of his Muni reform measure, and it includes an excellent provision to limit new parking downtown. This has Don Fisher’s allies all atwitter — and I hear Gutless Gavin is going to abandon his support for the measure, showing again that he’s nothing more than an errand boy for downtown.

New rumblings in the alternative press

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By Tim Redmond

So many interesting and odd things going on in the world of alternative media. Yesterday’s news: Creative Loafing, a small chain with four papers in Atlanta, Tampa Bay, Charlotte and Sarasota, just bought one of the granddaddies of the alternative weekly world, the Chicago Reader, along with the Reader’s Washington City Paper.

The fascinating element: Village Voice Media, the chain formerly known as New Times, has had something of a standing bid in for the Reader for years now, and that’s never gone anywhere. I know the folks in Phoenix are going a bit crazy today; that would have been a prime addition to the 17-member VVM empire, and it got away.

I don’t know why yet, but a couple of ideas occur to me – and one is that, with the losses mounting in San Francisco and Cleveland, and the prospect of big damages in the Guardian’s lawsuit, VVM simply didn’t have or couldn’t come up with the cash. And it would have been a bunch of cash, probably at least $25 million.

It’s also possible that the Reader owners just didn’t want to sell to the jerks at VVM.

Speaking of those jerks, a few interesting tidbits out of San Francisco: The web editor at the SF Weekly (part of the VVM chain) quit last week in a huff, in part, he wrote, because he didn’t like it when the bosses in Phoenix kept telling him to write nasty stuff about the Guardian.

And this is always interesting, from the anonymous crew at altweekly death watch.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Yeah, man, I was there: I saw the Grateful Dead play "Dark Star" on New Year’s Eve. Heavy.

Only it wasn’t 1967. It was 1981, becoming ’82, and we were at the Oakland Coliseum, not the Panhandle. The Summer of Love was long gone; Haight Street was at war, not over drugs but over gentrification, and the cops were cruising up and down, looking not for hippies selling pot and acid but for the self-proclaimed Mindless Thugs, who were throwing bricks through the windows of upscale stores and fancy bars.

Everybody falls in love with San Francisco the way it was the day they arrived, and mine was a distinctly anarchopunk scene. The soundtrack wasn’t Scott McKenzie and flowers in your hair; it was Jello Biafra, "California über Alles," and the kids were getting all bloody and bruised from slam dancing in clubs with black walls instead of mellowing out and digging the colors of the trippy light show.

But the spirit of the 1960s was still very much alive. The Summer of Love gets a bit glorified in the retelling, but in the end the part that survived was a spirit of community and rebellion. We were here because we didn’t feel like we belonged anywhere else, and as quickly as we could set down roots, we decided it was our city and we wouldn’t let the greedheads take it away from us.

And it’s been an endless battle for the past quarter century, but the bad guys still haven’t won; though much is taken, much abides … and every year we celebrate the best of the world’s best city with the original, first-in-the-nation Best of the Bay.

This year’s issue is in part a tribute to that summer 40 years ago when a new kind of politics, music, and culture was emerging in a city where Bruce B. Brugmann and Jean Dibble were helping create a new kind of journalism. Our local heroes this year are all people who were part of the Summer of Love — and are still doing cool stuff today.

It’s also a tribute to everything sensational in San Francisco. And now and then and forever, there’s plenty. *

The Chris Daly show

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By Tim Redmond

Oh, it’s so easy to make fun of Chris Daly. You can even make fun of his beard.

Or you can watch his much-derided speech at the Board of Supervisors, and recognize that: 1. He’s not a crazed nut; his points are cogent, well argued and entirely credible, and; 2. He’s right.

Daly is right: We should spend more money on affordable housing than on new roads. We should delay hiring more cops so we can save public health nurses. (Actually, we should raise taxes hire both cops and nurses, but that’s not in the cards right now.) The fact it, the mayor’s budget priorities are all screwed up.

Yes, budgets are always a compromise, and this district-elected board has done better, consistently, than any at-large board at keeping the mayor’s budgets relatively humane. I agree that Daly does himself no favors — and more than that, I fear that he does some harm to the cause of district elections. He says he cares nothing about his own political career, that he’s not a politician (which is one of the most charming and wonderful things about him), but he’s also part of a movement, and district elections is absolutely, utterly critical to the future of progressive politics in this city, and his fits of temper make the whole board look bad, and that helps the mayor’s candidates for supervisor and the people who would like to get rid of district elections altogether.

I think Daly needs to stop giving his enemies so much ammunition. There’s a lot more at stake here than one budget or one person’s future.

Still, I keep watching that speech, and I keep saying:

Shit, on the issues, the guy is right.

New redevelopment chief

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By Tim Redmond

Lots of talk about who the new SF Redevelopment Agency chief will be after Marcia Rosen announced (in terse terms) her resignation, which sounds awfully suspect. (Whenever you hear “resigned to pursue new opportunities” think: Canned for political reasons.)

One persistent rumor is that Mayor Newsom wants an African American to head Redevelopment, at a time when the agency is under fire in Bayview- Hunters Point. Some folks on the Wall suggest Sophie Maxwell, but please: Running an agency isn’t her thing.

We shall see.

Editor’s Notes

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EDITORS NOTES There was a fascinating moment July 11 at the San Francisco Board of Appeals meeting, a rare and revealing look into how city planning really works — and who calls the shots.

At issue was a proposal for two condo towers at Tenth Street and Market, one of which would soar 352 feet into the air — well above current height limits for the site. The developer also wants to put in 578 parking spaces, 399 more than the city Planning Code currently allows. It’s a monster of a project that would require seven planning code exceptions, two conditional use permits, and four zoning variances.

In other words, it’s not exactly what’s envisioned in the Planning Code for that particular lot.

But that didn’t bother Craig Nikitas, the city Planning Department staffer working on the project. In fact, in a long statement to the appeals board, Nikitas announced that city planners encourage developers to defy the current planning code since the planners think it’s outdated.

"The Planning Department encourages many project sponsors for tall buildings to use [a] height exemption," he said. That leads to "a taller building but a slimmer building…. That’s the kind of urban design we’re looking for nowadays."

Well, maybe — but the Downtown Plan, passed in 1984, calls for a very different type of design. It seeks buildings with setbacks (the so-called wedding cake look). That approach, which we all fought over in hearing after hearing before the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors, was designed in part to maximize sunlight at street level. That look may be old-fashioned architecture; it may not be what the current generation of planners wants. But it’s official city policy, city law.

If Nikitas and his boss, Dean Macris, want to change the guidelines for new buildings, there’s a procedure for that. You recommend changes to the Planning Commission, which can hold hearings and send new Planning Code changes to the Board of Supervisors. Then we all can discuss them in our usual, moderately civil, San Francisco fashion.

But that’s not how it works. Behind closed doors, the planners decide what they want the city to look like. Then they encourage developers to fit that model and bend the codes to make it all fit.

This is nothing new, but it’s rare to get such a clear admission, on tape, of why city planning in this town is so utterly screwed up.

In other news: there’s a bill before the State Legislature that’s supported by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Guardian. Labor likes it. The mayor likes it. The supervisors like it. And it could bring the city another $71 million a year in badly needed revenue (more than enough, for example, to solve Muni’s structural budget woes).

And yet it’s hung up in a Senate committee because Don Perata, the East Bay senator who is the president pro tem, doesn’t want any tax bills to go to the floor this year.

The bill by Assemblymember Mark Leno would allow — not require, but allow — the supervisors to put before the voters a proposal to increase the license fees on cars in this city to the level they were before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger cut them statewide. If San Francisco voters choose to tax their own cars, they will have the option; that’s all it is. Yet Perata’s press aide, Alicia Trost, told me it won’t even get a vote.

If you think that’s nuts, you can reach the good senator at (916) 651-4009.*

Why public broadband works

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By Tim Redmond

I just came across this wonderful report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance called “Localizing the Internet: Five ways Public Ownership Solves the Local Broadband Problem.” The folks at the Institute, which does great work, argue (as we have) that broadband is essential municipal infrastructure. They also say locally owned broadband is good for the economy. All the supervisors should read this before they vote to give it all away to Earthlink.

Earthquakes and nukes

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By Tim Redmond

Back in the early 1980s, San Francisco’s Public Media Center did a campaign against PG&E’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant with a slogan that read:

“A nuclear plant on an earthquake fault? PG&E is making the mistake of our lives.”

You see, Diablo’s built right smack atop the active Hosgri Fault.

PG&E has always insisted that there’s no problem, that the plant is perfectly safe, that even a severe quake wouldn’t cause any problems.

I’m sure the folks at Tokyo Electric Power said the same thing.

Except that their nuke just spilled some radioactive shit into the ocean, had to be shut down and is sparking calls for better nuclear safety. In fact, Japan, which has invested heavily in nukes, is starting to have some second thoughts.

I wonder what all the pro-nukers will be saying after the inevitable big quake hits San Luis Obispo and Diablo becomes a massive safety hazard. Maybe they’ll realize they made the mistake of our lives.

Are Migden’s billboards illegal?

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(Graphic from Calitics)

By Tim Redmond

Lawyers hired by the state Senate campaign of Assembly member Mark Leno have concluded that those big, colorful billboards promoting Carole Migden all over town are in fact an illegal campaign contribution from Clear Channel Corp. That was based in part on my blog of a few days ago, quoting Migden as saying that Clear Channel paid for the billboards but that her campaign had paid for the printing.

Check out the memo here.

Well, the plot thickens: I just talked to Richie Ross, Migden’s campaign manager, who says the senator was wrong: The Migden campaign never paid for printing anything related to the billboards. The boards, he insisted, were and are an independent issue-advocacy expenditure on the part of Clear Channel.

Well: My understanding is that independent means no co-ordination with the campaign in question, and it appears there was at least some connection here. Ross says he knew the billboards were going to go up, and that he talked to Colbruno prior to the launch. “I called him and said, ‘Michael, walk me through the law [on independent expenditures and issue-advocacy ads].’ He explained it, and I said okay.”

Ross acknowledged that the billboards use the images and graphics from Migden’s web site, but insisted that the material “was all publicly available.”

No question: The graphics on the boards and on Migden’s website are almost identical.

Now: I’m not a techie by any stretch, but I do have some modest experience in print and web media, and I can say that I think it would be pretty hard to download a four-inch graphic from a website and blow it up to the size of a giant billboard without some nasty issues of resolution. If I were going to print the big ol’ plastic sheets that got glued to these billboards, I would have sought an original, high-res copy of the graphics, which could only have come from the Migden campaign.

But at this point, we don’t know what really happened, since there is no written disclosure anywhere. And that’s not good.

This campaign money bill is nasty

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By Tim Redmond

Update on the :campaign-finance bill I mentioned a few days ago

This thing is pretty bad, and it’s winging its way through Sacramento with very little opposition. The bill number is AB 1430; it’s sponsored by Assemblymember Martin Garrick, a San Diego Republican who is mad that the San Diego Ethics Commission cracked down on unlimited GOP donations to local candidates.

The bill would limit the ability of local governments to control spending by political parties. Here’s an analysis by San Francisco Ethics Commission Director John St. Croix.

But the Democratic Party likes it, too, so the bill sailed through the state Assembly 77-0, and is headed for the floor of the state Senate. California Common Cause is against it, as is the League of Women Voters. The Ethics Commission has asked the San Francisco supervisors to oppose it, but nothing has happened yet.

The only member of the state Senate to come out against the bill is Carole Migden, who opposed it in committe and told us she will vote against it on the floor.

This one needs some attention, fast.

Migden: Clear Channel paid for the billboards

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By Tim Redmond

State Sen. Carole Migden just called me to answer the question I’ve been posing to her for a couple of weeks: Who paid for all those pro-Migden billboards?

Migden says it wasn’t a secret donor; as far as she knows, Clear Channel, which owns the billboards, donated them, through the efforts of Michael Colbruno, a local Clear Channel exec who is a former Migden aide and remains close to the senator.

“My campaign paid for the printing,” she said. “The money for the boards came from some sort of internal fund available to Clear Channel to pay for these things when there are boards that aren’t sold. It’s all perfectly legal.”

That isn’t exactly what Colbruno had told me, which was that this was entirely independent of the Migden campaign.

Migden agreed that the ads were “helpful to me,” but she also insisted that they were aimed in part at promoting her anti-war efforts, which will include a February state ballot measure calling for an end to the war.

Bottom line, though, these are billboards that promote Migden’s campaign, and if we hadn’t made a fuss about this, nobody would ever have known that they were, in effect, a gift from Clear Channel, one of the nation’s biggest (and some would say, most evil) media conglomerates.

An attempt to wipe out local clean-money laws?

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By Tim Redmond

Calitics has this interesting report on a state bill (backed by both political parties) that could eviscertate loical campaign-finance laws.

No suprise, but still noteworthy

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By Tim Redmond

I’m impressed that Dr. Richard Carmona actually came out and said what everyone in Wsshington knew was going on — that even doctors couldn’t provide accurate and true information to the pubilc if it interfered with the Bush Administration’s political agenda. The details are pretty stunning:

Carmona said he also ran afoul of politics on teen pregnancy prevention. Although the administration emphasizes abstinence from sexual relations, Carmona said he believed a variety of approaches was needed, including contraception for teens who are sexually active.

The administration “did not want to hear the science … but wanted to preach abstinence, which I felt was scientifically incorrect,” Carmona testified.

On the issue of stem cell research, Carmona said he found much of the discussion within the government “devoid of science.”

When will it end?

Harsh medicine

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By Tim Redmond

It hasn’t gotten much press, but talk about harsh: China just executed the head of its food and drug agency for approving unsafe medicine. And over here, we can’t even seem to put Scooter Libby in jail ….

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I don’t think anyone except Gavin Newsom’s inner circle and the folks who run Google and EarthLink really likes the mayor’s wi-fi contract, but it now appears at least possible that the Board of Supervisors will approve some version of it.

Board president Aaron Peskin wants the service improved a bit and is demanding some written guarantees that it will actually work the way it’s supposed to. Some opponents of the deal are arguing that it ought to be treated as a franchise, not a simple contract, and they want more legal hurdles. The serious techies say it’s the wrong technology anyway and will be outmoded and worthless in just a few years.

But there’s something bigger going on here.

A high-speed broadband system for San Francisco isn’t a hot dog stand and boat-rental shop in Golden Gate Park. It isn’t a restaurant lease on port property. It isn’t the naming rights for Candlestick Park or a permit to operate a taxicab or deliver cable TV.

Those are contracts and franchises. This is a piece of municipal infrastructure; it’s more like the roads that cars and Muni buses use to carry people around town or the pipes that bring water to our houses or the public schools that educate our kids or the emergency communications system that takes the call when we dial 911.

This is part of the city’s future, part of its economic development, part of how its citizens will participate in the political debate, part of how we will all learn and think and talk to each other. This is the new public square, the new commons.

Why in the world would we want to give it to a private company?

I don’t care if EarthLink and Google are offering 300 kilobauds per second of download time or 500 or 1,000. I don’t care if they promise to give free laptops to anyone who can stand on their head and shout "search engine." I don’t care if they promise to paint every light pole in the city green. They are private outfits set up to make a profit for investors. They have no business owning what will soon be the city’s primary communication system.

San Francisco has kept private operators from controlling its drinking water. This water is considered a basic part of life, and it’s available at low cost: San Franciscans pay less than one one-thousandth the price of bottled water for the stuff that comes out of the tap, and it’s almost certainly better. Same with roads and bridges, police and fire protection, and basic education (although that’s still a struggle).

I don’t get why broadband is any different.

I don’t think this would ever have been an issue 50 years ago. The generation that survived the Depression (with massive public-sector investment and ownership) and World War II (with huge excess-profits taxes on big corporations) and built things like the interstate highway system and the University of California didn’t see government as evil and inherently dysfunctional. The public paid to invest in public services.

It was Ronald Reagan and his ilk who took a generation disillusioned by Vietnam and Watergate and turned it against the public sector (see "Needed: A Campaign Against Privatization," page 5). Now we’ve even got a privatized war (and look how well that’s going).

The supervisors should get beyond the wi-fi deal’s little details and think about what it really means. This is San Francisco. We know better.<\!s>*

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Fourth of July week is supposed to be slow; when I worked for a daily newspaper, we used to do long stories on the fireworks displays just to fill space on the pages. Not here. There’s so much going on it’s hard to keep track of it all, but here’s a quick rundown on what San Francisco is facing this week:

A bill that would lift a veil of secrecy hanging over police misconduct cases is stuck in the Assembly Committee on Public Safety — and Fiona Ma is one of those holding it up. Ma is a protégé of John Burton, who wasn’t easily intimidated, but she’s acting as if she’s terrified of the police lobby, which has mounted a major effort to kill the bill. It’s crazy — Ma has a fairly safe seat, and unlike some Democrats in marginal districts, she doesn’t have to fear that the cops will back a Republican against her. This is one of the worst moments in her career in Sacramento thus far, and she needs to get off the fence and back the bill when it comes up for reconsideration.

The long-awaited draft environmental impact report for the Eastern Neighborhoods zoning project just came out, and it says just about what I and many others had expected: following the proposals that the City Planning Department is putting forward would wipe out a fair number of blue-collar jobs and would not provide anywhere near enough affordable housing to meet the city’s stated needs. This ought to be a central issue in the mayor’s race (if there ever really is one); I’m not willing to accept as inevitable the loss of working-class San Francisco, and neither should the mayor.

Mayor Gavin Newsom finally signed the Community Choice Aggregation bill (see page 10) — but not with the sort of fanfare you’d expect for a program that could profoundly change the city’s energy future. Sen. Carole Migden has come forward with a bill to ensure that the power from city-owned renewable-energy projects is available to the city and doesn’t have to go into Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s maw.

Speaking of Migden: who exactly is paying for all those billboards with her face on them, touting her leadership? As we discuss on the www.sfbg.com politics blog, it’s a fascinating question. Michael Colbruno, a spokesperson for Clear Channel, which owns the billboards, refuses to say. He insists that the ads are simply "issue advocacy," which means nobody has to disclose who paid the tab. I’m not going argue campaign law with Clear Channel, but I suspect that Migden knows who gave her this nice present, worth tens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps she’ll share that information with the rest of us.

In the meantime, the folks at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce — those great champions of open government who love privatization and refused to support the Sunshine Initiative — have a sunshine measure of their own. They want the supervisors to hold hearings before placing anything on the ballot. That’s a direct attack on some recent ballot measures the chamber didn’t like.

I’m all for hearings. Hearings are good. But the law would require that the hearings be held 45 days in advance of the ballot, and that would be a serious drawback for progressives who want to get measures that couldn’t pass the board on the ballot. Frankly, I’m dubious about the chamber’s motives.*

Downtown’s car obsession

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By Tim Redmond

So the developers and some businesses want to build more parking in San Francisco. We’ve seen this game before; in the past, the supervisors have been able to shoot it down, but now it may go before the voters. Here’s the part of the argument that infuriates me:

Supporters claim the initiative, sponsored by the San Francisco Council of District Merchants Associations, prepares The City for an expected influx of vehicles during the next five years.

Why is there an “expected influx of vehicles?”

Why is the city constantly looking for ways to plan for more cars?

Why isn’t it official city planning policy that the number of cars in San Francisco will decrease over the next five years?

This is the great lie of urban planning (as practiced by developers and their advocates): First you “project” more cars (or more jobs, or more population or whatever). Then you automatically have a case to build — more garages, more parking lots, more condos, more highrise office towers — for your “projected” demand. And, of course, once you bild million-dollar condos, they fill up (perhaps with globe-trotting wealthy people looking for pieds-a-terre, but whatever), thus fulfilling the “projections,” and once you make room for more cars, you’ll get more cars in a city that already has too many.

These “projections” are a bogus, self-fulfilling prophecy. Let’s project a city we really want, and plan for that one.

Paris Hilton is not news

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By Tim Redmond

Holy shit — watch Mika Brzezinski try to argue that on MSNBC and get treated rather shabbily by her male co-anchors.

There’s fire, a shredder, a sniffing scene — and a very good journalistic point. Don’t miss it.

Fiona Ma and the cops

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By Tim Redmond

Thanks in part to a San Francisco legislator, a bill to reform police secrecy is dead in the water. SB 1019, by state Sen. Gloria Romero of Los Angeles, did in the Assembly Public Safety Committee when not a single committee member would move to consider the bill. Assembly member FIona Ma, who represents San Francisco, sits on the committee; she as among those who killed the bill.

BeyondChron has a pretty good summary of this, including the astonishing information that one of the police unions threatened to scutle the Legislature’s attempt to amend term limits if this bill passes.

The bill is still (barely) alive, and could come back for reconsideration — if Ma would stip kowtowing to the cops and agree to at least bring it up for a vote.

The Nation blasts SF Weekly’s parent

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By Tim Redmond

Long, detailed article in the Nation this week by John Wiener on how sharply the LA Weekly has declined since Village Voice Media, the parent company of SF Weekly, took over.

It’s exactly what a lot of us predicted: No more endorsements. No more progressive politics. No more reporting or commentary on the war in Iraq. Sad.

Who paid for Migden’s billboards?

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By Tim Redmond

There’s been a fair amount of flap over the big billboards featuring Carole Migden that appeared all over the Third Senate District around Pride weekend. The messages — describing Miden as a leader and thanking her for her work — don’t include any statements identifying the donor who paid for them. That’s led some to suggest that it’s a clandestine gift from Clear Channel, which owns the billboards.

But according to Michael Colbruno, a former Migden aide and close ally who now works for Clear Channel, there’s another explanation:

The billboards, he told me, are “issue advocacy” ads — which means they’re not regulated by campaign-finance disclosure laws. They were purchased, he said, by an individual or entity that is not a campaign committee — and Clear Channel won’t say who it is.

“It’s not a political sale,” he said. “It’s an independent advocacy ad, and the payment information doesn’t have to be disclosed.”

I asked him if Clear Channel charged the ad buyer full price or perhaps offered a discount. “We don’t disclose rates,” he said.

The ads sure look political to me: One of them thanks three local legislators for supporting the infrastructure bonds — Migden, Don Perata and Leland Yee — and pointedly leaves out another member of the local delegation, Mark Leno, who also supported the bonds, and who happens to be challenging Midgen in next year’s state Senate primary.

But what Colbruno is telling me is that an unknown donor has just done a huge favor for Migden, worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars — and the public will never know who it was.

Leno, not surprisingly, was furious to hear about this:

“The only way this situation can be considered legal is if the suggestion is that these billboards are issue-advocacy ads and not campaign related — but anyone who believes that is a fool,” Leno told me. “If anyone tried to thank me this way, I would tell them no and make them take it down.”

I’m pretty dubious, too — I’m sure Migden knows who paid for the ads, and she ought to tell the rest of us.

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