In This Issue

YOU HEAR SO many ugly stories about the insurance industry – seniors losing their health benefits, accident victims who can't get compensated, huge premiums, and coverage denials ... and that's not even counting the major motion pictures and John Grisham novels. And then, as A.C. Thompson reports on page 21, there's the case of the Blair family.

The Blairs' Sunset District house caught fire in 1999 and was heavily damaged. The family's insurance company, Allstate, hooked them up with a contractor, who got a $300,000 advance payment to start fixing the place. Four years later, it's still utterly uninhabitable.

According to a lawsuit the Blairs have filed, the contractor (who was on the insurance company's preferred list) did slow and shoddy work, even attempting to reuse fire-damaged wood (covered up with a little paint). Interestingly, another San Francisco homeowner filed an almost identical lawsuit around the same time, accusing Allstate and the same contractor of doing almost the exact same thing.

Consumer advocates fear that major insurers are working with contractors who lowball costs to keep payments down – so people who paid their policies faithfully over the years wind up with a house they can't live in. And that's not a novel.

In other news: Camille T. Taiara reports on page 13 that San Francisco State University cops are secretly spying on student activists. Somehow, I'm not surprised – S.F. State has a history of bungling its response to protesters, and special police fiefdoms have a history of doing bad things without adequate oversight. (You have to wonder – why does S.F. State, an urban campus in a city that has a couple of thousand sworn officers on the streets, really need its own police force?) Somebody needs to make the campus cops adopt a reasonable policy to prevent spying on students. It's not that difficult – the UC Berkeley Police Department has that sort of policy. Maybe state senator John Burton, who did wonders forcing Hastings College of the Law to pay attention to community concerns and scrap its plans for a giant parking garage in the Tenderloin, could pick up the phone and call SFSU president Robert Corrigan and let him know that the legislature is watching.

Meanwhile, over at the Ferry Building, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is trying to steal the city's electricity customers – great news for all of those people who insisted that the city could trust PG&E.