Of bile and tantrums

Item: "Notice is hereby given that the regular meeting of the San Francisco Planning Commission for July l8, 2002 is canceled."

From the city's official Web site

IT IS NOW becoming increasingly clear just how far Mayor Willie Brown is willing to go to discredit the reform-minded San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the process of district elections that created it.

Despite his lame-duck status, Brown is acting as if he would like nothing better than to keep the supervisors simmering, then see them and their issues and causes go down in flames in the November election. It is a form of governing by bile and tantrum. Consider the following:

The supervisors tried to clean up Brown's Election Department mess with a measure approved by the voters last November to set up an independent Elections Commission. The newly formed commission then fired elections chief Tammy Haygood, for good reason, but Brown and allies urged her to play the race card and helped orchestrate a nasty campaign to get her job back and further poison the election process and quite possibly the upcoming November election.

Brown is now playing a childish game of chicken with the supervisors over the Planning Commission and Board of Permit Appeals appointments, created by Proposition D, passed in the March election, as a supervisorial move to reform a couple of mayoral fiefdoms. He put up the same cast of characters for the Planning Commission that created the problem in the first place, then yanked them off the table before the supervisors could vote on them. Two of the mayor's appointees, Hector Chinchilla and William Fay, should never be approved by the board. Chinchilla and Fay have walked in step with the well-connected lobbyists who greased the skids for a torrent of illegal live-work development approvals that contributed to rampant evictions, gentrification, and general upheaval in the city's neighborhoods (see "Giving Away the City," l0/l8/00).

For the Board of Permit Appeals, Brown put up three members of the old controversial board, including John McInerney and Arnold Chin. McInerney was a regular violator of the city law prohibiting commissioners from lobbying other officials for clients. Attorney Quentin Kopp sued McInerney in l998 for violating this law. The result of these Brown shenanigans: the planning process has ground to a halt, and the developers are licking their chops.

Brown also threw down the gauntlet to the supervisors with this year's brutal budget, a budget that protected the rich, the cops, and the highly paid bureaucrats – and screwed everybody else (see "Brown's Brutal Budget," 6/3/2002). As Camille T. Taiara reports on page 17, the board did not pick up on the challenge and in effect rolled over, l0-l. Brown's fingerprints and footprints were all over the Pacific Gas and Electric protection movement inside City Hall that almost put a public power charter amendment on the ballot without the key components of real public power.

What can be done? Brown soon will be gone. Meanwhile, the key is to keep the pressure on, on the mayor and the supervisors, and make sure that every incumbent and challenger running for reelection understands what the mayor has been up to and why his actions only make the case even stronger for keeping and improving on district elections and grassroots community power in San Francisco. On guard.