By G.W. Schulz

This week we posted a story about two contractors hired by the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District in 2001 to complete phase two of its ongoing (and over-budget) retrofit.

The original contract was for $122 million, but a spokesperson for the bridge told us this week that the joint venture formed by two contractors to bid on the job, Shimmick-Obayashi, would actually earn more than $150 million for the work, which is almost finished.

Our story explains that following the accidental death of a carpenter named Kevin Noah, Shimmick-Obayashi was fined $26,000 by Cal/OSHA for allegedly failing to properly rig Noah’s fall protection and also for not providing workers with scaffolding to stand on where the footing was less than 20 inches wide.

But Shimmick-Obayashi never paid the fines, because on appeal three years later, a lawyer from the company argued that the original citation didn’t contain its full legal name. An administrative judge bought the claim and tossed all of the citations.

What we didn’t have space for in the story was explaining the extent of the construction work both companies have conducted in the Bay Area.

60-story Millennium Tower

By Tim Redmond

Jake McGoldrick was the swing vote on the wrong side on the 3400 Cesar Chavez project. Some interesting comments and debate here.

I don't think McGoldrick is corrupt (as one commenter says at leftinsf), and I'm not going to support the attempt to recall him (as another proposes), but I'm deeply disappointed. McGoldrick is a housing guy; he knows better than this.

I live near 3400 Cesar Chavez, and the plan is terrible for the neighborhood. We could have stopped it, and opened the door to a real affordable housing effort. Damn.

Isn't this special? Joe Veronese, police commission member and state Senate candidate, and Julie Veronese, pose with Warren Hinckle, who is in his usual sartorial splendor. (Thanks to Luke Thomas and Fog City Journal)

by Amanda Witherell

photo courtesy of Green Guerrillas, www.letsgreenwashthiscity.org

Some of the city's PG&E watchdogs are sweating over what the mayor's been up to lately and are worried he may sneak a pro-PG&E/anti-public power measure on the ballot by Friday's deadline. Take a look at their concerns here and give ole Gav a ring to let him know what you think.

By Steven T. Jones
After a preliminary hearing, Judge Harold Khan has ruled there is sufficient evidence to put Sup. Ed Jew on trial for perjury and other charges related to the allegations that he doesn't really live in San Francisco and is therefore unqualified to hold off. No big surprise here, but it does raise the question of what Mayor Gavin Newsom is waiting for. Part of his job is to initiate official misconduct proceedings against supervisors were elected fraudulently, or who shake down their constituents for $40,000 cash bribes. Mr. Mayor, what are you waiting for?

By Sarah Phelan

But will the Air Quality District ever levy any asbestos-related fines from Lennar?

If you got the impression from yesterday's Board hearing that Lennar won’t get fined for screwing up asbestos dust mitigation at Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard, think again. Or, at least, hold that thought for now.

Karen Schlocknick, spokesperson for The Bay Area Air Quality Management District, reports that the air district is still looking into the matter—and has “up to three years” to decide how much to fine Lennar.

One year has already passed since Lennar came forward and admitted that there was a problem with the batteries in its air monitors at Parcel A. So, that leaves the Air District with two more years to make its move, though Schlocknick predicts that, “it won’t take that long”.

By Tim Redmond

I came to San Francisco in 1981, and there were people sleeping in Golden Gate Park. Dianne Feinstein, who was the chief exec back then, would periodically try to get rid of them. Art Agnos and Frank Jordan did the same thing. At one point in the 1990s, when Willie Brown was mayor, he discovered the shocking fact as if for the first time, and had a team sweep the campers out. Now the Chronicle has gotten the scoop yet again, and the mayor has dispatched his shock troops and is trying it all anew.

It won't work this time, either.

There simply aren't enough places for homeless people to sleep in this town. The shelters are unpleasant and often dangerous, and don't work for people who are opposite-sex couples (all the shelters are men- or women-only) or people who have dogs (and there are quite a few homeless people with dogs). They aren't a long-term answer for people who drink or take drugs, since they're all alcohol and drug-free (or are supposed to be).

The transitional housing the mayor is promoting is fine -- but there are thousands of homeless people and not enough rooms for all of them. So if you sweep the park, you just get homeless people sleeping in doorways.

Mark Salomon had an interesting post on this on the PRO-SF listserv; you can read it after the jump.

by Amanda Witherell

This is sort of funny and sort of annoying, considering that when I contacted Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant to request a tour for a story I was working on about the future of nuclear power, I was denied admittance and told:

"All tour requests are screened against the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's post-9/11 requirement that U.S. nuclear plant licensees provide tours only when there is a clear business need. Upon review of your request, we have determined that it does not meet this screening requirement."

Which is total bullshit. The same week I made my request, a reporter at the OC Register got a tour of San Onofre.

That aside, this guy got a free ride in!

By Steven T. Jones
There's still one more week for candidates to get into the mayor's race -- and I wouldn't be at all surprised if more people jump in now that Matt Gonzalez has bowed out. But for now, the two most interesting candidates are Josh Wolf and Chicken John, who will face off in a debate/fundraiser this Sunday evening. It promises to be at least as interesting and substantive and Mayor Gavin Newsom's lame town hall meetings, albeit without the bevy of department heads paid by taxpayers to be there. No, expect this one to be a bit more edgy and free form.
The event takes place at Chez Poulet (aka Chicken's performance-friendly home) at 3359 Chavez (which Chicken still stubbornly calls Army) St. @ Mission starting around 9 p.m. A $10 donation is requested.

By Tim Redmond

Here's a classic Gavin Newsom idea: Since he can't get the supervisors to sign off on a baldly flawed wi-fi plan (which the prime contractor may be ready to abandon anyway), there's talk that the mayor will simply put his wi-fi plan on the ballot.

That way Earthlink and Google (if they still want to do this thing) can put up a bunch of money, and newsom can use it to claim he's trying to get something done (and he can bash the supes a bit in the process) and the rest of us will have to spend a bunch of time and money fighting to stop a dumb idea from getting voter approval.

Wi-fi and Community Choice Aggregation; it could be the all-privatization ballot.

By Sarah Phelan

ATSDR's Region 9 office covers a lot of ground, including San Francisco's Hunters Point Shipyard.

Susan Muza works at the Region 9 office of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. That's the agency that agreed on July 17 to do a public health assessment of Lennar's development at Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard where fear runs high that the community may have been exposed to toxic asbestos dust.

Community members voiced those fears during a July 31 Board hearing, but the Board voted 6-5 against urging the SF Department of Health to temporarily shutting down Lennar's construction site, until health concerns had been addressed.

As it happens, ATSDR has experience with such assessments in California, thanks to Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado County, where naturally occurring asbestos was identified in surrounding rocks and where a vein of asbestos was disturbed during construction of a soccer field at the school.

Muza told me that at Oak Ridge High, ATSDR sampled and tested soil from baseball and soccer fields, parking lots, as well as dust collected from a school classroom that had potentially been affected by a leaf blower.

What ATSDR found, says Muza, was that “sports coaches, outdoor maintenance staff and student athletes had the potential to be exposed at levels higher than previously thought.”

In the case of Lennar’s Parcel A development, the classrooms and basketball courts of the Muhammed University of Islam sit on the other side of a chain link fence, where massive amounts of asbestos-laden rock were moved in the last year, but where air monitors weren’t operating for three months, and watering was inadequate for six months.

“At Oak Ridge High, we recommended that people try to limit any further exposure and that those most highly exposed inform their physicians that they had potentially been exposed to asbestos, that they should monitor for signs of disease, related to that exposure, and that they should participate in very good preventative care, such as flu shots, to make sure their respiratory health stays healthy," Muza said.

ATSDR is also monitoring cancer registers in the EL Dorado area.

As Muza notes, “one big problem with asbestos is it has a long lag time. The period between exposure happening and disease manifesting can be 10-40 years.”

Although the San Francisco Department of Public Health has claimed that workers were wearing CAL OSHA authorized asbestos monitors at the Hunters Point shipyard site and that CAL OSHA did not report any exposure exceedances, Muza told me that ATSDR does not support using worker asbestos limits in evaluating community members’ exposures, other than as a reference point.

As ATSDR’s website explains, “worker limits are based on risk levels that would be considered unacceptable in nonworker populations.”
The reasoning behind disqualifying worker limits as a valid assessment tool is that community members may be children who are lower to ground, more active and have higher metabolisms. Or they may be seniors, or residents who live near the site, 24/7.

“No exposure to asbestos is good,” says Muza. “We are all exposed to it, thanks to brake linings, amongst other things, but we want to keep our exposure as minimal as we can.”

In the case of Oak Ridge High, ATSDR recommended some removal activities, because material from the vein of asbestos that got broken when the soccer field was built, got spread around the school.

“And we recommended paving and landscaping activities to reduce people’s ability to being exposed,” adds Muza, noting that ATSDR did not recommend that Oak Ridge High be closed or relocated.

In San Francisco, ATSDR plans to evaluate the asbestos dust mitigation plan that Lennar agreed to when it got the green light to begin development on Parcel A in 2005. ATSDR will also evaluate how Lennar actually implemented that plan, along with results from air monitors, and any other data that they can ascertain will be helpful.

“We also plan to gather community concerns, be very transparent and talk to everyone,” says Muza who has sent out a letter to stakeholders, including the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Bayview Hunters Point Project Area Committee, the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee, The San Francisco Chapter of the NAACP, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, and, of course, the Muhammed University of Islam.

Says Muza, “We will summarize the concerns we hear, sort out what we can address from what we can’t and come to the community with a plan.”

By Steven T. Jones
Our political leaders in Sacramento apparently still can't muster the courage to create a high-speed rail system for California, which is perhaps the single most important public works project for addressing climate change and the hopelessly congested freeways and airports we'll otherwise see in coming decades. After a tentative agreement two months ago to give the California High-Speed Rail Authority less than half of the $103 million it needs to move the project forward (which was better than the insulting $1.2 million offered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger), the most recent deal gives the authority just $15.5 million. And even that could get line item vetoed by the Governator.
Assemblymember Fiona Ma had pledged to safeguard this important project and it doesn't appear she's been very effective so far (maybe she should spend less time doing Clear Channel's bidding in trying to line our freeways with obnoxious electronic billboards). But her flak, Nick Hardman, tells me she's working hard to make sure the high-speed rail bond measure remains on the fall 2008 ballot, from which is can be removed with a simply majority this year, but only with a two-thirds vote of both houses after Jan. 1. This will be an important test for Ma, who has said that the project is one of her top priorities.
Stay tuned.

Greatest career path, ever. Mental note: little flag pins.

By Marke B.

I love it. Really! Congress has just voted in a basic legal carte blanche for the Administration to spy on Americans' emails and phone convos without any court review. Ostensibly, the new law is only to target foreigners who talk to Americans by allowing the government to tap into fiber optic networks based in the US (previously they could only tap into those based on foreign soil) -- and the Administration promises -- PROMISES -- not to use any tips obtained this way to go after Americans on the one end of the conversation. I believe them! Only foreigners are terrorists anyway (sorry, Oklahoma).

The best parts?

*Telecommunications companies must obey the government on this. No more of those pesky legal challenges from the more skeptical among them that were gumming up the spyworks. And no more of that free market hooey from our overlords. Just make the corporations do what you want. Terror!

*Bye-bye to FISA, the oversight court set up in the '70s in reaction to Nixonian dirty tricks re: domestic spying. Guess who gets final approval on who gets spied on when? ALBERTO GONZALES. Guess all that lying and "misremembering" and total dereliction of basic duty evidenced when he was in the congressional hotseats -- what, three times in the past 3 months? -- convinced Congress that he should be in charge of the nation's privacy. Way to go Alberto! I've GOT to try your tactics in my own career.

Remind me why I was happy about the Dems taking Congress again? WTF?

By Tim Redmond

The Fair Political Practices Commission is investigating whether state Sen. Carole Migden violated campaign finance laws. That's not the first time a local politician has been investigated and it won't be the last, but this one has some odd and potentially very significant twists.

For one thing, Migden's campaign manager admits that the charges are "absolutely legitimate." And if one of the key allegations is true -- that Midgen illegally transfered $1 million from an Assembly race account and another $500,000 from a Board of Equalizaton race account to her state Senate campaign coffers -- then she may have a real problem. She may have to stop spending that money -- if if she did that, her financial advantage over challenger Mark Leno would evaporate.

By Tim Redmond

Sasha at leftinsf has the right line on the mayor's sudden move to put a nonbinding wifi measure on the ballot: The guy never approved of nonbinding resolutions before (he's ignored Question Time), but now he wants one of his own. And it's going to be so simple: Free wifi for all. Who can be against that? (As long as you don't look at the details.)

By Steven T. Jones
There's lots of talk about a compromise that might avert this fall's campaign battle between advocates of giving even more space to cars (the downtown, developer and conservative players who paid $60K for a measure to undo progressive city parking policies) and those who understand that we must fix Muni and provide for more transportation alternatives if we're to avoid gridlock, global warming, air pollution, and ugly and dangerous auto-centric neighborhoods.
But personally, I think this is a debate that we should confront head on -- particularly now that top campaign consultant Jim Stearns will be running the effort to approve Sup. Aaron Peskin's Muni measure (which will kill the heinous pro-parking proposal if it passes, thanks to Peskin's smarts and spine). "This is the future of San Francsico transit that we're debating," Stearns told me.
A hard-fought campaign would also expose Gavin Newsom's underhanded tactics in undermining smart growth policies on behalf of his downtown backers, as well as a new analysis by Planning Director Dean Macris of how the downtown-backed parking push would reverse city policy and conflict with our General Plan in ways that may be illegal, and which are most certainly short-sighted and stupid.
But then again, this parking measure is so bad that perhaps we should opt for certain death instead of giving it any chance at all, as long as we don't weaken the city's long-established transit-first stance in the process.

By Tim Redmond

Sup. Chris Daly, who unequivocally was not running for mayor a few weeks ago, is now actually talking about it again. The journalist in me says that’s a wonderful idea – raise some issues, stir up a fuss, force Newsom to face a real challenger in a real debate …. Makes for great stories.

The San Francisco progressive in me is a bit more nervous.

Daly’s not going to win, not without some sort of stunning event. (Which is possible; I mean, Newsom could utterly melt down in October, start babbling incoherently, punch out Dan Noyes on camera, admit he was secretly funding the weapons procurement program at Your Black Muslim Bakery or something …. And Daly could suddenly find himself the front runner.)

But for all practical purposes, the point of a mayoral race would be twofold: To raise issues while holding Newsom accountable – and, equally important, to build momentum for the fall 2008 supervisorial races.

I can’t emphasize enough how important the 08 races are – control of the board, and the political agenda in the city, will be at stake. Tom Ammiano, Aaron Peskin, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval will be gone, victims of term limits. Ross Mirkarimi will be up for re-election, as will Sean Elsbernd. In four key open seats, the entire balance of power in the city could shift.

So the question is: Does Daly as a mayoral candidate help progressives win those seats by generating energy and organizing talent the way Ammiano’s 1999 race and Matt Gonzalez’s 2003 race did? There are, as I've pointed out before, some good things about a Daly for Mayor campaign. Or does Daly, who is not terribly popular outside his district, actually drag down progressive candidates by losing badly to Newsom and allowing the mayor’s forces to brand all the progressives as Daly-ites?

Can this race bring us all together as progressives, or just create more rifts?

If Daly wants to run, he’s got some work to do, because this, of course, is much bigger than him. And I think he knows that.

When Gonzalez decided to run four years ago, it seemed like a bit of a last-minute unilateral decision, and a lot of the activists in town felt left out. Daly’s got to do better: He needs to be sure that at least some of his progressive board colleagues (many of whom he’s been fighting with) will endorse him and help; running without any support from other progressive leaders would be tough. He needs to mend fences with some of his slightly bruised pals (which would be a good thing to do anyway).

He needs to line up some community backers and seasoned campaign workers who will sign on for the battle. He needs to think about how he’s going to raise money.

Of course, there are always surprises; state Sen. Carole Migden is in a big fight of her own, against Assembly member Mark Leno, and Leno is backing Newsom. Maybe Migden would support and raise money for Daly, who she’s been close to in the past (and who is supporting her over Leno). Which would make for an interesting political season.

But again, the question at hand is how will this benefit the progressive cause, not just now but over the long haul. Three days of hard thinking to go.

By Tim Redmond

The mayor continues to push forward with his wifi plans, but check out this Mercury News piece on how Newsom-style programs aren't working out so well in other places.

By Tim Redmond

If you don't like the notion of a 1,200-foot tower scarring San Francisco's skyline -- and I don't -- then maybe you ought to read this fascinating piece on Calitics, and stop for a minute to think about what this city, and this state, is doing.

Why do we have to live with a giant highrise office tower near the Transbay Terminal? Because if we don't, there won't be any money to build what should be the central transit link for the Bay Area, a landmark bus and train station on the scale (we're told) of Grand Central in New York. It's an essential part of the city's future.

But the project costs a lot of money, almost a billion dollars -- and nobody wants to pay higher taxes to fund this sort of thing. In fact, nobody in California wants to pay higher taxes for anything. So the folks at City Hall have decided that the only way we can have a new transit terminal is if we hock a piece of our city and our skyline to fund it. So we take some of the land on the terminal site and let a developer build a monstrosity of a highrise on it -- and that will bring in the money that we can't get any other way.

It 's the same reason we have that god-awful RIncon Tower sticking its ugly head into the sky: The developer offered to pay for a fair amount of affordable housing and other community amenities that the taxayers won't fund because local government can't raise taxes in California without reaching extraordinary lengths that are almost politically impossible. So here's the deal: You want affordable housing? Give a big developer the rights to do something awful, and in exchange, we'll get a few dollops of cash for civic needs.

Imagine, for a moment, what the state might look like if we'd had to cut this kind of deal to build the University of California system. You want nice colleges? Okay -- sell off the coast and let it become a giant Miami Beach. You don't want to do that? Too bad -- no world-class university system for your kids.

This is the devil's bargain we have agreed to settle for in 2007, and it sucks.

By Steven T. Jones
The word is that Chris Daly is meeting with supporters tonight to decide whether to run for mayor. It could probably go either way. Meanwhile, there's an increasingly strong movement underway to draft Janet Reilly into running for mayor. She didn't return my call asking about it, but we're hearing from some who say she's thinking about it. The advantages of a Reilly run are that she could dump lots of her own money into the campaign, she's a woman, she's good-looking and smart, she doesn't bring a lot of negative baggage with her, she's acceptable to many progressives and many swells, and she'd capture a lot of voters who are sick of both Newsom and Daly.
In fact, she could even win, particularly if Daly got in and he, Ahimsa Sumchai, and Chicken John were hitting Newsom from the left and Tony Hall was taking his nastiest punches from the right. Reilly could stay above the fray and be there to take advantage of a Newsom meltdown, which is always a possibility. Hmmm, it's something to think about, at least for the two days until the Friday 5 p.m. deadline.

By Tim Redmond

Sahsa at leftinsf has the full text of the mayor's wifi initiative posted, and a phrase I hadn't known about just leaps out:

(4) The City should initially provide the Wi-Fi Network through a public-private partnership that utilizes expertise of the high technology sector and minimizes financial risk to the City;

In other words, the mayor's official declaration of policy (also signed by Sup. Aaron Peskin, who ought to know better) directly takes on and attempts to derail any type of municipal wifi service. The way Newsom is putting it out, we simply must privatize this piece of public infrastructure.

Nice work.

By Tim Redmond

I'm really glad Paul Hogarth of Beyond Chron got to ask Hillary Clinton a tough question at the YearlyKos conference. And I'm glad his excellent query got some media bounce. I still think this was a little over the top, but nobody who works at the Guardian should ever complain about a little self-promotion.

But what makes this so astonishing is that it's even news in the first place. No discredit to Hogarth, and I'm not in any way minimizing his work or the importance of what he did, but why did it take a 29-year-old blogger from San Francisco to do what the high-paid, high-profile crackerjacks who are covering the presidential race for the mainstream media ought to be doing every day, as a matter of course?

By Tim Redmond

So the mayor and Sup. Bevan Dufty have officially dropped the ball. They have decided to (more or less unilaterally) eliminate any sort of Castro Street celebration, but they have nothing to replace it with.

So what happens when a bunch of partiers still decided to go to the Castro and have fun? What if bar owners decide to defy Dufty and stay open that night? Will the cops come and round everyone up? Will they send in water trucks to hose down the celebration?

What do Dufty and Newsom think a few houndred thousand people are going to do on Halloween -- stay home? Not likely.

by Amanda Witherell

Yikes, doesn't this picture give you the willies? It's from the Japanese nuclear power plant, located on a fault line like another nuke plant we know. (Ahem, Diablo Canyon.) Last month it succumbed to the Murphy's Law of its seismology. This week a UK Times reporter took a tour of the facility and reports that officials are actually considering restarting the reactors even though the superstructure is still impassable and waste leaked out after the quake. Awesome.

By Tim Redmond

Sup. Chris Daly, who was talking over the past few days about a campaign for mayor, has decided against it. He sent a statement tonight; I'll post the whole thing:

Progressive Allies and Friends,

For the past 6.5 yea