By Kimberly Chun

Thought me and my pal were going to recreate the Donner Party's flesh-chomping shenanigans this past weekend: we were caught in the snow storm over Highway 80 on Feb. 25, heading from Reno and the Who's Feb. 23 US tour kickoff concert back to frisky ole Frisco. Scary, snow-slick road conditions and worse, frightening near-standstill traffic. We left Reno at 1 p.m. and at around 6 or 7 p.m. finally, carefully pulled into a slippery, icy, snowed-in Truckee - about five or six hours after we spotted a "Truckee: 12 miles" sign.

A winter wonderland for skiiers and fresh-air fiends - a nightmare for motorists.

The freeway resembled a ski run.

Californians really are equipped for "weather" conditions!
Check the dude in the T-shirt in the middle of a blizzard.

by Amanda Witherell

It's almost fair and festival season in San Francisco, but we'll see if some actually get a chance to be staged in the neighborhoods where they were born.

The North Beach Festival had a setback yesterday at the Operations Committee of the Recreation and Park Commission. According to festival organizer, Marsha Garland, commissioners Megan Levitan and Tom Harrison expressed concern about alcohol being consumed in city parks and the committee decided to kick the issue up to the full commission. Last year the same issues came up and Garland had made some changes to her proposal -- no sale of booze in the park and more fencing of the masses -- in order to mitigate concerns that the park and surrounding neighborhood are adversely affected rather during the two days of the festival. Garland and many merchants and citizens consider the festival a boon, bringing additional commerce and attention to their area of the city. An anti-group thinks the hood doesn't need it.

Meanwhile, the future of the Haight Street Fair is being discussed tonight at the Park Branch Library, from 7 to 9 pm. Some key city and neighborhood planners will be there and it's sponsored by the HAIGHT ASHBURY NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL (For more information, call Karen Fishkin, 921-2032).

By Steven T. Jones
steve@sfbg.com
Sources at the San Francisco Chronicle say that Editor Phil Bronstein and Hearst Corp. executives yesterday convened an hour-long emergency meeting at the paper to warn that more layoffs and other cost-cutting measures are on the way. They provided Chronicle staffers with few details, except to say that all temporary employees would be terminated at the end of the current pay period. Employees were simply told that the paper would be getting smaller and that more details on what that means would be coming in the near future.
Employee morale at the paper isn't high right now, with this new round of cutbacks following a major staff reduction in 2005 (done primary through optional buyouts), new labor union contracts approved last year that significantly eroded employee rights and essentially broke the Pressman's Union, an unseemly partnership between Hearst Corp. and competitor MediaNews, and the Chronicle's recent decision to include advertising on the front of its Bay Area section and occasionally even on its front page.
We'll have more on this unfolding story as it develops.

By JB Powell

Tomorrow could be ‘show me the money’ day for the SF Port Commission. Commissioners there will vote on the Trans Bay Cable, a privately financed, $300 million power cord that would run underwater from Pittsburg. For weeks, staff members from the port as well as various other city agencies have been hammering out the details of a community benefits package with the cable’s developer, Australian financial firm, Babcock and Brown. The Guardian has obtained a staff report with details of the proposed benefits package. Several officials had already told us it was “significant” and they were right. If the deal goes through, the port will reap millions in rent and licensing fees, a needed cash-infusion for the strapped agency. The package also includes hefty sums for waterfront open space and, in perhaps the biggest news for the city, millions of dollars for the SF Public Utilities Commission. The SFPUC plans to use the funds to bankroll sustainable energy projects, including solar, wind, and tidal initiatives.
Why the largesse? Many of the cable’s shore-side facilities would be on port land. That means Babcock and Brown needs port commission approval before the project can move on to the last local regulatory step, the Board of Supervisors. If the cable goes through, it would plug the city’s electrical grid into 400 megawatts of power from plants in and around Pittsburg. But green power advocates claim the “59 mile extension cord” would be a “waste of resources.” Their biggest fear is that bringing all those relatively cheap megawatts into the city from fossil-fuel burning plants across the bay will derail the city’s plans to rely on more eco-friendly energy.
But the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) insists the city needs the cable or it will see blackouts in the future. Cal-ISO is the “public benefit corporation” in charge of the state’s grid. Sources in and around city hall have described the bind local leaders are in: they would rather look to greener power projects to solve the city’s energy needs, but electricity can be the third rail of California politics. Just ask Gray Davis. So, in an attempt to have their megawatts and eat them too, staff from the mayor’s office and several supervisors, as well as the port and SFPUC, pushed hard for the best “benefits package” they could get from the developer. It remains to be seen if the money for renewable energy projects will placate the activist community. Stay tuned to the Guardian for more coverage on the issue in the coming weeks.

By Tim Redmond

The CoCo Times has this beauty of a report target="blank" on the missing records from the mayoral administration of Jerry Brown. This kind of crap has been commonplace in San Francisco -- exiting officials grab anything that might be negative or incriminating and flee with it -- but I didn't expect that from Jerry, who is not the state's attorney general. Bad news.

By Tim Redmond

The Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club may wind up endorsing Mark Leno for state Senate next month without even hearing from his opponent, Carole Migden.

The club voted March 12 to go ahead and suspend the normal rules to allow an early endorsement of Leno, who is challenging Migden for state Senate. Frankly, it's not a big surprise -- everyone knew that Alice would wind up backing Leno. That club is very much his political base.

Still, some club members thought that there ought to at least be a candidate's forum before the final vote, where Migden would have a chance to show up and make her case. A motion to make the early endorsement contingent on that was handily defeated.

Now, club president Rebecca Prozan is scrambling to pull a forum together before the final endorement vote in April -- but there's guarantee it will happen. Prozan told me she thinks Migden should have been invited to speak before the final vote, "but the membership rejected that position."

This strikes me as a bit unfair -- and not a terribly productive way to go about local politics right now. Sure, Leno's the club favorite, and that's fine -- but Migden is also a legitmate LGBT community leader with a credible record and constituency, and a queer San Francisco political organization in a potentially divisive race like this ought to go out of its way to be fair to all involved and not to leave anyone with bitter feelings.

By Steven T. Jones
Charlie Goodyear, a veteran political reporter for the Chronicle and my colleague on the City Desk NewsHour, has resigned from his journalism jobs to work for high powered flack Sam Singer, whose clients include Lennar Corp., the 49ers, and former Newsom consorts Alex and Ruby Tourk. I like Charlie and have respected his work, so it's sad to see yet another experienced journalist leave the business. Like most who have done so, Charlie was pushed out by the increasingly unhappy environment at the Chronicle, which is pursuing yet another round of staff reductions, and pulled by the lure of big money offered by the public relations industry.

By G.W. Schulz

Poor 7x7 magazine. They try so hard to sound authoritative on all the subjects they cover. And to be sure, they’re quite good at publishing photo spreads of wealthy philanthropists forcing bleached-white terrified grins like hostages hearing a your momma joke from a bank robber.

But if the subject doesn’t involve skin-tight “Juicy Couture” maternity jeans (page 16 in the April issue), or how to get naked with a stranger using feng shui (page 54 in the April issue – it’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds), then their coverage is likelier to fall flat on its face with an embarrassing thud.

For instance, punk rock is all the rage these days at San Francisco’s rag for the richest. A magazine like 7x7 understands counterculture and punk rock about as well as a dog understands irony. They’ll just never quite get it. (Do we really have to point any of this out?)

But with the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park hosting an exhibit for queen-of-the-punk-aesthetic fashion guru Vivienne Westwood, and the documentary Punk’s Not Dead appearing at the upcoming SF International Film Festival, the city’s opulently rich have decided shit is all about curling your lips and pumping your Prada purses defiantly in the air.