In This Issue

I GUESS THE honeymoon is over. Mayor Gavin Newsom's mountain of popularity among progressives – created by his bold decision to direct the city clerk to issue same-sex marriage licenses – is starting to crumble in the wake of a still unexplained police shooting and mounting tension between the cops and the community.

As Steven T. Jones, Sitara Nieves, and Lee Hubbard report on page 19, Newsom and police chief Heather Fong met with activists behind closed doors for several hours Friday – then Newsom ducked the press and ran out a back door, without answering any of the mounting questions about the shooting of Cammerin Boyd. Meanwhile, the Bayview is under siege, with residents nervous about the potential for more police violence.

And what's Newsom's new Police Commission president, Louise Renne, doing? She's suggesting that maybe the commission doesn't need to meet every week, since there's not too much of substance for the commissioners to talk about. Amazing.

And it's still a few weeks before Newsom has to put out his budget.

That, of course, will be the big test, both of the new mayor's leadership and his political skills. There's no way to craft a budget that closes a gap of more than $300 million without making someone mad. Already, he's asking city employees to take a pay cut (another pay cut – they took one last year) to help save essential services. But he hasn't said anything publicly about how he's going to ask downtown to chip in.

There's no way to balance this budget without a bloodbath unless the mayor is willing to demand higher taxes from big business. There are all sorts of tax proposals floating around, and downtown will almost certainly object to some or all of them. And if the public doesn't make it clear that most of San Francisco expects big business to pay its fair share, it will be hard to get Newsom to stand up to the folks who were his biggest campaign contributors.

So Service Employees International Union Local 790, which represents city employees, will be holding a big "Downtown, Do Your Part" march May 13. "It shouldn't be necessary to shame companies into supporting the services that they, their employees, and their customers all use," SEIU organizer Robert Haaland notes. "But we're too familiar with the lengths our corporate citizens go to escape their obligations."

It starts at 5 p.m. at the Pacific Stock Exchange, 115 Sansome, S.F. For more information call (415) 575-1740, ext. 139.