Mr. Postman, send me a vote: Early and out-of-town voters caught a break June 17 when the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an ordinance requiring the city to pay postage for absentee ballots.

While 34¢ doesn't sound like much, "it does provide a little more of an incentive for people to vote by mail," political-research guru David Binder explained. And that could help progressive causes, he said, since "it's traditionally more difficult to get liberals to the polls." (Cassi Feldman)

Presidio protests continue: Inside the Officers Club at Fort Mason June 13, it was a Presidio Trust lovefest as community groups and residents, who less than a month ago blasted the federal agency's proposed master plan for the national park, gathered to sing the praises of the final version of the Presidio Trust Final Management Plan.

But the crowd inside the meeting didn't by any means represent the full spectrum of opinion in the city. Four hours before the meeting San Francisco environmental groups stood outside the gates of the park's Main Post entrance – a few miles from the site where George Lucas's 900,000-square-foot digital-arts center will soon be built – to blast the trust's plans.

"We are not against sustainability or even development and restoration," Nia Crowder of the District Two Neighbors said. "What we are concerned with is privatization specifically for profit."

The trust's final plans for development are extravagant and go beyond what is necessary for self-sufficiency, the groups said.

"We believe that the plan that they are proposing has [more] development than is actually required," said John Rizzo, vice chair of the Sierra Club's San Francisco chapter. "We presented a plan which has far less development which is based on the original plan for the Presidio – and the trust has actually agreed that our plan would get them financial self-sufficiency – but they're going with the plan that earns them more money."

Steven Krefting of the San Francisco League of Conservation Voters said the trust lacks commitment to the 1994 General Management Plan Amendment's vision of a historic and natural park. He cited page 114 of the final management plan, which states, "Consideration for the park's financial welfare is a key element of every trust decision."

"This might be a good mission for a corporation, for a profit-making enterprise," Krefting said. "I don't think it's a good mission for a national park."

Unfortunately, not one of those groups was complaining in 1995 when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) passed her legislation privatizing the Presidio. Now the Sierra Club is asking the trust to delay voting on the final management plan, scheduled for July 11, until Aug. 21. But don't hold your breath. "We really feel like this is the end," said Hillary E. Gitelman, the trust's deputy director for planning. (Shadi Rahimi)

Word games: News of contracting scandals at the Human Rights Commission is, well, old news. The HRC, which monitors compliance with the city's minority contracting laws, was the subject of a three-year FBI investigation into contracting-fraud allegations that began in 1999. Last week new allegations surfaced against the agency at a meeting of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.

Here's the story: The HRC was created to reduce the number of white-owned firms hired for city contracting jobs. HRC rules dictate that the city make its best effort to reach registered minority-owned and disadvantaged companies to give them a fair shot at new jobs. But Anthony Imperial, owner of event-production company Story Road Consulting, says that even after repeated complaints, he is often left out of the bidding process.

Imperial says there are many small-business owners like him who have complained with no result. He wrote the HRC March 28 asking for any complaints the agency had received from other firms. The HRC told Imperial he was on a wild-goose chase: there were no such records.

Imperial complained to the sunshine task force, an 11-member panel charged with forcing wayward city departments to comply with local public information laws. Under intense grilling from task-force chair Joshua Koltun June 12, HRC attorney Catherine Barnes confessed that the agency has received complaints about contracting. But, she said, they call them "bid protests," and since Imperial hadn't asked for those, HRC staffers didn't produce them.

That's the sort of circumstance the city sunshine law was supposed to eliminate. The law says every department must post a list of available records on the Web, to help citizens identify what they need. The HRC hasn't complied.

Now Imperial is waiting for the HRC to dig up the relevant bid protests and a few other records. The results, he promises, will be a bombshell, revealing an institutional pattern of discrimination at an agency whose mandate is to end such patterns.

"If you upset the HRC, they do nothing for you," he told the task force. "There are companies that are very frightened by the city."