I guess the point is that the BILLIONS in benefits SF is requiring of CPMC to rebuild is not enough?

Glad that we required this level of extortion for any of the other SF hospitals which are legally required to meet a level of seismic safety

What you all just wrote sums up pretty well the -basic- dynamics that we currently face with this monster Sutter/CPMC hospital deal. But you gave no treatment in this piece to the fact that 'Community Benefits' agreements while a mangled tool to gain meager concessions from developers, rarely accomplish more.

Worse still is the fact that developers like Lennar, and other corporations like PG&E, routinely throw like candy to starving children, 'Community Benefits' (as well as donations and grants) to nonprofits and neighborhood groups, and make cynical deals with labor bosses, to manipulate these groups and their leaders into supporting bad projects that would never have been approved in the first place, and which only -were- approved because of the droves of people these bought off organizations turned out, to massively pressure City commissioners and the Board of Supervisors.

The toxic, gentrifying, Lennar Bayview Hunters Point projects should never have been approved, and yet they were, because of 'Community Benefits' deals which bought off labor, cash strapped nonprofits, and churches, etc.

And It took -decades- to close the fossil fuel power plants in the city because of similar dynamics engaged in with nonprofits, et al by PG&E.

Over the past decade in San Francisco in my own work locally to push for good community policy, and especially, to fight the bad, I have come to know 'Community Benefits' and similar manipulations by corporate donors, to be my number one enemy. And an enemy that repeatedly pits against eachother, nonprofit, labor, and other organizers who -should- all be working together to stop the corporate takeover, exploitation, and degradation, of our city.

This 'Community Benefits' paradigm is also inherently and ridiculously unequal. The power and leverage, is massively disproportionate, that large corporations and developers wield when they sit down at the table to supposedly 'negotiate' with deeply economically dependent and cash poor nonprofits, and with unions which have progressively been drastically downsized and weakened over the last several decades.

This whole ridiculous 'negotiating' process is resulting in the continuing slow motion take over of the City by corporate greed and manipulation, and it needs to end.

Specifically in the case of CPMC, the pending citywide Health Care Master Plan that David Campos got passed last year could be used to put Sutter/CPMC in its place and force it to comply with a sane plan for comprehensive San Francisco hospital care. Currently Sutter/CPMC is exempted from this legislation. Let's simply reverse that mistake and pass a measure which forces Sutter/CPMC to strictly comply with the Master Plan, and thereby give ourselves a much more powerful negotiating position.

After that is accomplished, we will then have far greater leverage, backed up by new city law and the enforcement of it, when we sit down with Sutter/CPMC to negotiate.

At that point, if our immediate reality is that we need to use a 'Community Benefits' agreement process to reach a deal with Sutter/CPMC, so be it.

However the nonprofits and labor organizations of San Francisco need to get real about this fundamentally deeply flawed 'Community Benefits' nonsense, and in the coming year of the rise of the 99%, join together to rid ourselves of the 'Community Benefits' trap, and fight corporations and developers -unified- instead of being endless played against eachother to fight over the pathetic crumbs that these corporate fat cats purposely throw so sparsely and selectively at our feet, to divide and conquer us.

They are exempt from paying taxes, but in return, must provide charity care to the community. That's the in-lieu of part. They clear about $150,000,000 a year (by their own account), pay no taxes, but then provide charity care at1% of their profits. How twisted is that?