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Web site of the week: WWW.SOFIAMILOS.COMSeveral media reports romantically linked Mayor Gavin Newsom and actress Sofia Milos, a Scientologist who dragged the mayor to an event hosted by a Church of Scientology spin-off group. Maybe Newsom was helpless against the charms of a beautiful woman who boasts: "Passion is my surname." URBAN IDITAROD The 12th Annual Urban Iditarod rolled through San Francisco March 4, with an estimated turnout of 1,000 people divided into teams of dogs and mushers guiding shopping cart "sleds" through town. Event founder Tom Kramer told the Guardian, "We add to the ironic value of the San Francisco experience. It's not just the beautiful weather and amazing architecture, it's the possibility of a random experience. That's why people come here."
Bad attorney, no faijitas The most notorious police scandal in recent San Francisco history is generating more bad behavior — this time by a lawyer in the City Attorney's office. Late last month, a state appeals court issued a pretty interesting opinion in a long-running lawsuit filed against defrocked cop Alex Fagan Jr., the man at the center of the 2003 Fajitagate train wreck. The suit centered on allegations that Fagan Jr. had attacked and threatened to kill a Native American man named James Smith in 2002. While the appellate judges didn't reverse the lower court's ruling — which cleared Fagan of wrongdoing — they did take a significant swipe at deputy city attorney Sean Connolly, who defended Fagan and the SFPD during the trial. In their opinion, Connolly engaged in "misconduct" that was "utterly unprofessional and unworthy of an officer of the court." "I'm as upset about this as anything I've ever seen," Judge William Stein vented while discussing the matter in court in January. Connolly, the judges concluded, made improper personal attacks on Smith and his attorneys, misled the jury during closing arguments, and repeatedly sought to introduce evidence the court had thrown out. "The City Attorney takes charges of improper conduct seriously," says Matt Dorsey, a spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera. Still, Dorsey maintains, "Sean Connolly is an aggressive and talented litigator who does an excellent job for the taxpayers." Smith's lawyer, Eric Safire, is not pleased: "It absolutely breaks my heart that the City Attorney would go to such lengths to defend a rogue cop like Fagan Jr." (A.C. Thompson) Cops vs. community It was an unsettling but ultimately triumphant way to mark the last day of Black History Month. At issue was creating a Homicide Prevention Planning Council and putting at least $10 million a year for three years into bottom-up programs designed to do something about the city's record-high murder rate. Community activists streamed to the microphone for almost an hour during the Feb. 28 Board of Supervisors meeting, all supporting the initiative by Sup. Chris Daly to put the question before voters in June. They issued passionate pleas for support from a city that often seems to only want to take a top-down law enforcement approach to the problem. "Those affected are the real experts in deciding how to craft a response to the issue," Daly said at the hearing. He later added, "We've heard from the people, and now it's incumbent for us to act on what we're heard." Yet supervisors Sean Elsbernd, Bevan Dufty, Michela Alioto-Pier, Jake McGoldrick, and Fiona Ma listened instead to Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Police Officers Association, both of whom opposed the measure and instead supported the mayor's $16.5 million alternative, most of which goes to pay already accrued police overtime costs (including the overkill at many antiwar marches) and hire more cops. "We don't view it as sound public policy," Newsom press secretary Peter Ragone said of why the mayor opposes the Daly initiative. "We've made a number of policy proposals that we feel will be more effective." Yet the community-based proposal won out, with the progressive block of the board voting 6–5 to send the measure to voters this June. (Steven T. Jones) Revving up Sup. Jake McGoldrick is sometimes the swing vote on divisive measures that come before the Board of Supervisors, and few issues in San Francisco get more divisive than the question of whether to close Golden Gate Park to car traffic on Sundays, as it is now on Saturdays. So the car-free community was overjoyed on Feb. 28 when McGoldrick proposed a six-month Sunday closure pilot program, starting this summer. Apparently McGoldrick has decided he wants to help de Young Museum backers live up to their previous campaign promises of creating a "pedestrian oasis" in the heart of the park. More to come. (STJ) |
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