WEB SITE OF THE WEEK

WWW.EXPOSETHEGAP.COM

A coalition of labor unions, child advocates, and social justice groups kicked off its campaign against the Gap on March 9 outside its store at Market and Powell Streets. They accuse the corporate giant of marketing to kids, then funneling some of those profits into fighting measures like Proposition 82, which would tax the rich to fund universal preschool in California.

For this year's St. Patrick's Day parade in San Francisco, the local Irish Northern Aid chapter chose as its honorary grand marshals the "Rossport Five" — (from left) Willie Corduff, Brendan Philbin, Vincent McGrath, Micheál Seighin, and Philip McGrath — who were jailed last year for blocking construction of a Shell Oil Company pipeline through Ireland's County Mayo, which the government had approved over local objections.

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Politics over policy in Newsom veto

Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation that would restrict how many parking spaces developers can build with their downtown housing projects just as he was headed into a roundtable discussion with community newspaper journalists March 10. Asked about it at the forum, Newsom dismissed his critics by saying, "It's politics and politics."

His press secretary, Peter Ragone, was meanwhile down the hall, giving the same spin to the journalists from larger newspapers including the Guardian. Ragone blamed Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin (who sponsored the vetoed measure) for having "backed out" from "compromise legislation" developed in preparation for the veto that he said had the support of some developers, planning director Dean Macris, and Tom Radulovich, director of Transportation for a Livable City.

Maybe the mayor is right that politics have trumped good policy during the sordid saga that led to this veto. But if so, it's Newsom who made that choice, opting to do the bidding of big developers and other downtown power brokers rather than heeding the input from the planning and policy professionals he appointed.

Confronted with this reality by the Guardian, Newsom got indignant, telling us, "I refute that. I'm for good public policy.... The suggestion that I did [a favor for developers] is an attack on my integrity."

Yet Macris, Radulovich, Peskin, and a broad range of public interest groups all told the Guardian that they were disappointed by the veto and preferred Peskin's bill to the one Newsom is proposing, which makes concessions to developers by allowing more unsightly three-story parking garages and dangerous, traffic-congesting driveways in the downtown core, among other changes.

"I've been an advocate of this [legislation] from day one. This [veto] was the mayor's decision," Macris told us.

Macris confirmed that Peskin had incorporated all of the Planning Department's recommendations into his legislation. "I'm trying to get the political leaders to come to an agreement because the city needs this," Macris said.

Yet the veto sends this effort back to square one, albeit with the mayor's written endorsement of legislation that caps residential parking at 0.75 spaces per housing unit and a number of other provisions designed to discourage dependence on automobiles by those moving into the nearly 10,000 housing units slated for downtown.

That's an improvement on the position Newsom staked out in December, following a meeting called by Gap founder Don Fisher and other downtown power brokers, at which it was agreed that a group of developer attorneys would write competing legislation that Newsom then endorsed (see "Joining the Battle, 2/8/06). The developer legislation, sponsored by Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, is a weak and loophole-ridden measure that has little support outside of downtown (both Macris and Radulovich call it unacceptable).

Then, as the Board of Supervisors was preparing to approve the Peskin measure on a 7–4 vote last month, the Mayor's Office produced a letter criticizing the legislation that was supposedly written by Macris but had actually been penned by Ragone and Matt Franklin, the mayor's housing policy director, while Macris was out of town. After rejecting several versions of the letter, Macris finally gave reluctant approval to the last-minute letter calling for some minor changes to the legislation to avert the threatened veto.

Ragone told reporters that the veto was based on advice from planning professionals and accused progressives of playing politics, but Peskin called Ragone's spin tactics "bald-faced lies." While Peskin accepts the changes and will even sponsor the new legislation, he said the veto was simply a favor to Fisher and the developers. "The mayor has undermined his planning director and the duly appointed Planning Commission."

"All of this came from the Mayor's Office, all of it. We were clear that we liked the other version, and so was the Planning Department," Radulovich said. "Are any of us happy about this? No. Do any of us think this makes it better? No." (Steven T. Jones)