Harris's money problems The well-financed campaign to put Kamala Harris in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office has spent so much money trying improve her name recognition and poll numbers that it now risks breaking a signed pledge to abide by campaign spending limits.

That places the candidate, who is trying to portray herself as a clean, ethical leader in the law-enforcement world, in a touchy position: either she has to break her word (and the law), incur a $5,000 fine from the Ethics Commission, and suffer the political consequences – or she has to sit dead in the water, relying only on volunteers, for the campaign's final seven weeks.

The latter seems unlikely: if anything, the Harris campaign seems ready to pull out all the stops, with Mayor Willie Brown working behind the scenes, to overcome incumbent Terence Hallinan's substantial lead in the polls.

A poll cited in the Sept. 3 newsletter of the downtown-backed SFSOS put Hallinan some 20 points ahead of Harris. He's at 33 percent, Bill Fazio is at 24, and Harris is at 12. At best, after spending more than $100,000, she's moved up about three points since June.

On Jan. 1, Harris – a former prosecutor who has taken leave from her post in the City Attorney's Office to run for D.A. – signed a formal, legally binding pledge with the Ethics Commission to abide by the $211,000 spending cap set for the race.

But by July she had spent more than half of that, some $132,000. Then last week two glossy, multicolored mailers arrived in voters' mailboxes. One blasted Hallinan for what the mailer called a poor record handling domestic violence cases, and another condemned him for being "helpless" to stop the rash of crimes committed by youths.

As of the morning of Sept. 15, the Harris campaign hadn't filed with the Ethics Commission the required documents disclosing the cost of the mailings. But after we called treasurer David Looman, the campaign faxed over a barely legible disclosure statement claiming one mass mailing cost $21,000 and the other $23,500. Other consultants we called said that's a very low estimate. Still, the $44,500 total would bring Harris's spending to $176,500 (not counting the cost of another fundraising letter she recently sent out).

The cap isn't an issue at this point for Hallinan or Fazio: Hallinan reported in July raising just $42,186. Fazio reported $105,339.

During the first week of August, Harris sent a representative down to the commission to ask whether her spending-cap pledge might be rescinded, city hall sources told the Bay Guardian. But the agency doesn't allow that.

Looman acknowledged that the spending cap had become an issue and said he didn't know how the campaign would deal with it. (Savannah Blackwell)

Greens go Gonzalez It was hot. It took hours. But even though the very modest headquarters of the San Francisco Green Party was jammed with tired, overheated bodies on the evening of Sept. 11, the party's members did manage to reach a decision on how to use their growing clout in the 2003 race for mayor.

By a 55 to 16 vote, they endorsed Sup. Matt Gonzalez. Late last month the Greens held a contentious meeting in which no candidate garnered the 75 percent needed to win endorsement (see Campaign Watch, 8/27/03). And on this Thursday night, more than a dozen members who strongly backed Sup. Tom Ammiano tried to hold out for a ranked endorsement of both Ammiano and Gonzalez, and some felt slighted by having to settle for a special commendation recognizing the help Ammiano has given progressive causes and candidates.

"The Greens could care less about the fact that Ammiano endorsed [Green Party leader] Medea Benjamin for Senate in 2000," one member wrote in a note to us. (Blackwell)

Public power's cover boy Last week former supervisor Angela Alioto raised the profile of public power in the 2003 mayor's race by holding a press conference and announcing her plan to create a company that could one day take over Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (see "San Francisco Gas and Electric?," 9/10/03).

Meanwhile, Sup. Tom Ammiano also touted public power, only in a quieter way. The September-October issue of Public Power, the publication of the American Public Power Association, features a question-and-answer column with Ammiano, who authored 2001's Proposition F and coauthored 2002's Proposition D.

In it Ammiano says he'll consider the issue a high priority, should he make it to Room 200 at City Hall. And he uses his typical humor to point out the advantages: "I think government can do a better job of providing a utility service. We don't do it for a profit, so we'll never have a Martha Stewart." (Blackwell)

No votes for oil During the Bay Guardian's coverage of efforts to implement instant-runoff voting, David Lee took strong exception to our suggestions that he and his Chinese American Voter Education Committee were allied with the downtown political machine that was trying to kill IRV in order to help mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom (see "Who's Fighting Election Reform?," 7/2/03).