As always, Guardian political reporters will be in the field on Election Night, reporting live from City Hall and all the key parties via this Politics blog. We're gathering that list of parties now (send yours to me at steve@sfbg.com to ensure you make the list) and we'll post it by around this time tomorrow so you know where to go. And don't forget to vote.

I've gotten a lot of calls about the two redevelopment measures, and while I think our endorsements make the case for F and against G pretty well, let me add something else.

In many ways, this is the first of a long series of battles that will determine whether Southeast San Francisco becomes a high-end residential community. That's what Gavin Newsom wants to see, and it's what a lot of downtown and big-money forces want to see, and frankly, it's what the more moderate and conservative political activists want, too.

Because the more rich people you bring into San Francisco, and the more poor and working-class people you drive out, the more likely to are to change the progressive voting patterns of this town and get rid of politicians who want to tax big business and provide public services to the needy.

This is not conspiracy thinking -- dontown political strategists talk openly about it. As Calvin Welch likes to say, "Who lives here, votes here." W e know that; they know that.

I appreciate the fact that labor got some concessions out of the Lennar Corporation . But in the end, even if the labor deal holds up, the numbers are brutal: If Lennar agrees to build about 32 percent affordable housing, that means that 68 percent of the new housing in Bay View Hunters Point will be exclusively for millionaires.

That's the calculus. A developer promising to build one-third affordable units is also promising that two-thirds of the new housing will be affordable only to the very richest segment of American society, the top tenth of the top tenth, the people who can put down $200,000 cash and pay a mortgage of $6,000 a month on a one-bedroom condo. If two thirds of the next generation of San Franciscans are people with that kind of money, the city will change, dramatically.

Sup. Chris Daly's call in Prop. F for 50 percent affordable ought to be the absolute minimum floor. Again, that means half the new housing will go to the superrich, and only the superrich.

Lennar says it can't do the project at that level. I personally think that's horseshit -- remember, they're getting the land essentially free. But if the best Lennar can do is build housing two-thirds of which is unreachable to the vast majority of the people who make this such a wonderful, diverse and creative city, then we need to send Lennar packing and find someone who can do better.

This is the future of San Francisco, folks. That's why I'm yes on F and no on G.

As we predicted , Mayor Gavin Newsom used today’s budget announcement at at the Hunters Point Shipyard to campaign.
But there were, in fact, two Newsom’s at today’s event, but only one was told to shut it.

‘You can’t campaign here, it’s city property,” police told the guy, who was wearing a Newsom mask and protesting the Mayor’s Budget.

“I’m not campaigning,” the guy replied, his voice muffled by his mask, as his friend, who was wearing a Ronald Reagan mask handed out fliers that listed nine ways in which “Mayor Newsom terminates poor with massive budget cuts.”

(These included closing the Ella Hill Hutch shelter, Caduceus Outreach services, SRO Families United program, and a 22 percent cut of residential substance abuse and mental health treatment programs budgets.)

But no one said diddley when the guy who one was wearing a very well tailored suit and presenting the Mayor’s $6.5 billion budget, began to campaign by unashamedly pushing Prop. G, which out-of-town developer Lennar has spent $4 million to promote.

“You can’t have a budget speech about the future of the City and the structural challenges we face without talking about it,” Newsom said.

Nor did anyone say squat, when Newsom began to bash the competing Prop. F, which requires that 50 percent of housing built at the Shipyard and Candlestick Point be affordable to families of four who make $65,000 and under, which is the average median income for that size household in the Bayview.

Yes, it was cool to be inside the SFPD’s unit, without being on the wrong side of the law.

At today's Local Homeless Coordinating Board meeting, Mayor Gavin Newsom's homelessness “czar,” Dariush Kayhan, briefed the group on new ideas for improving city-funded shelters that he and the mayor have been hashing over.

There were just a few, and most of them seem like they need coordination more than cash, but they all answer, to some extent, some of the calls for help that have been coming from the city's homeless shelter system.

All of this comes from a Feb. 14 announcement by Mayor Newsom that he'd like to redesign the city's shelters, (the day after SFBG published an expose on conditions inside.) At the announcement, Newsom discussed possibly consolidating shelters into larger facilities, offering more medical respite care, and bringing Project Homeless Connect into the shelters. Ultimately, he called on the people working in San Francisco's homeless services industry to come up with for how to make shelters better.

Since then, a series of long, comprehensive meetings have been held to gather ideas from homeless people, shelter clients and employees, non-profit groups, medical and mental services providers, and advocates. Meetings were held at shelters and other places convenient to the homeless population (though at all the meetings I attended there was a lot of criticism that the forums weren't drawing in enough actual homeless people.) Topics tackled included problems accessing the shelters and the quality of medical and other support services -- and suggestions were plenty. The Local Board pulled together a report, outlining the most frequent, concrete, and consensual, the most repeated being: don't reduce the number of beds. (Too bad: The Human Services Agency cut the shelter at Ella Hill Hutch from their budget, which means, as of June 30, 100 fewer mats will be available every night unless advocates rally the Board of Supervisors to put the funding back.) The other biggest cry was for more services in general, made more easily accessible, and a number of really smart ideas came out for how to do that and are included in the report [PDF].

Kayhan said he and the Mayor would be putting together an official response to the report with more concrete details of their vision. In the meantime, he threw a few ideas to the meeting.

They include:

The Coalition on Homelessness has done a quick survey of the budget slashes that were announced today.

To sum, if you're a cop, you're psyched. If you're down on your luck, without a place to stay and off your meds, and the city's been helping you sort all that out....well, you've got until the end of the month to get it together.

From COH's executive director, Jennifer Friedenbach:

Mayor Newsom released a budget today that will terminate critical health and human services, while pumping up salaries for police by 25% and adding many new high paid patronage positions into his own administration.

Some highlights of the devastating impact of the budget include:

1) Closure of Ella Hill Hutch shelter, serving up to 100 people every night in the Western Addition.

2) Closure of Caduceus Outreach Services, a mental health treatment and wrap around support program for severely disabled homeless adults with co-existing addictive disorders.

3) Almost total elimination (66% cut) of "SRO Families United," a program for families with dependent children living in hotels.

4) Cut of 22% to residential substance abuse and mental health treatment programs budgets. This includes:

a. Removal of support from Conard supportive housing program for severe psychiatric disabilities.
b. Closure of Cortland Acute Diversion Unit for individuals in psychiatric crisis.
c. Loss of 12 out of 24 community based medically supported detox beds.
d. Many more residential cuts yet to be determined.

5) Cut of 30% to all outpatient substance abuse and mental health treatment

6) Almost total elimination of STOP treatment program.

7) 1,600 people lose psychiatric treatment through Private Provider Network.

8) Closure of Tenderloin Health, homeless multi-service center in the Tenderloin serving over 300 people a day, 16,000 unduplicated people a year. Program provides health services, HIV case management, HIV prevention, mental health services, harm reduction work, improving quality of life by getting people out of rain, providing hygiene kits, bathrooms, snacks, crisis intervention, 30, 000 shelter reservations a year.

The Associated Press is reporting that Barack Obama has secured enough delegates to win the Democratic Party nomination for president, even before today voting in South Dakota and Montana. On to the White House.

Here's a roundup of the main local election night parties:
Yes on A – Great American Music Hall, O’Farrell and Polk streets

Yes on F, No on G – Grace Tabernacle Church, 1121 Oakdale

Yes on G, No on F – Javalencia Café, 3900 3rd Street

Mark Leno – Campaign HQ, 1344 Fourth Street (at "D" Street)
San Rafael, CA 94901 (he might also stop by Lime, 2247 Market Street, where some DCCC candidates – including Laura Spanjian and David Campos – are having a party)

Carole Migden – Campaign HQ, 121 9th St., near Minna

Joe Nation – Wipeout Bar and Grill, 302 BonAir Center, Greenbrae

Fiona Ma for Assembly – Soluna, 272 McAllister

No on 98/Yes on 99 – 1601 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland

League of Young Voters, Sandoval for Judge, progressive DCCC candidates and some Yes on F and No on Prop. 98 supporters – El Rio, 3158 Mission Street

And then there’s the Bay Guardian’s “Don’t Dodge the Drafts” election night party, 7-9 p.m. at Kilowatt, 3160 16th Street btw Valencia/Guerrero. Bring your voting stub for drink specials.

The Chronicle reports that turnout so far is really slow. That's bad for saving rent control (No on 98), stopping Lennar Corp. (no on G), electing a progresive judge (Sandoval) and stopping Joe Nation from becoming the next state Senator.

If you're reading this, go vote. If you're not sure where you vote, check here. If you don't know who to vote for, our recommendations are here

It only takes a few minutes, and your boss has to give you time off if you need it. Go on, head to the polls now.

Tonight's election results will demonstrate how much money matters in local politics, and whether megadeveloper Lennar is able to essentially buy exclusive development rights for southeast San Francisco. That's because the $3.9 million and counting that Lennar has spent to approve Prop. G and kill Prop. F could be the most expensive local measure campaign in California history, according to former Common Cause of SF head Charles Marsteller.
To confirm that, I called Bob Stern at the Center for Governmental Studies -- the guru of California electoral reform -- who had a more qualified answer. Campaign finance records show PG&E spent almost $10 million last year to defeat a package of four public power measures in Yolo and Sacramento counties. PG&E also spent more than $3 million to defeat the Prop. D, the 2002 public power measure in San Francisco. And Stern was trying to get final figures for an expensive 2006 ballot fight in Sacramento over a new stadium. Yet he said Lennar is way up there, well beyond anything he's seen in his native Southern California.
"It is clearly one of the most expensive," Stern said. "It's an enormous amount of money for a local race."

Oh my. For all you folks that have been following the controversy around building new power plants in San Francisco, it just got even better.

Mayor Gavin Newsom sent a letter to the Board of Supervisors today outlining a “more promising way forward than the current proposal” to build two natural gas-burning “peaking” power plants in the city.

The way forward: retrofit three existing diesel turbines at the Mirant-Potrero Power Plant, while at the same time shutting down Unit 3, the most polluting part of the power plant, as soon as the Transbay Cable comes online.

“On Friday, May 23, Ed Harrington [General Manager of the SFPUC], City Attorney Dennis Herrera and I met with president of Cal-ISO – Yakout Mansour, the chairman of the CPUC – Mike Peevey, the CEO of Mirant – Ed Muller, the CEO of PG&E – Bill Morrow, and our respective staffs. In this meeting we vetted the possibility of retrofitting the diesel turbines [currently owned and operated by Mirant] and asked each stakeholder to give us the necessary commitments to advance this alternative,” Newsom wrote to the Board.

For anyone who's been closely following the nuances of this argument, this is a significant change in position from the California Independent System Operator [Cal-ISO], and it should be noted that it took -- not just the Mayor sitting down at the table -- but top dogs from PG&E and Mirant (who both stand to lose money by the city building its own power plants), as well as the CPUC's Peevey, who's never expressed a positive opinion about the true need for more power plants in the city.

Now, suddenly, Cal-ISO is departing significantly from all previously expressed demands that we build power plants.

The background: The state, through Cal-ISO, has for the last several years insisted that San Francisco needs 150 megawatts of peak electricity at the ready. We currently get this from Mirant-Potrero, but Unit 3 of that facility has a bad rep as the greatest single source of pollution in the city. People in the Bayview neighborhood, which have carried more of their fair share of pollution, have been waiting a long time for the plant to close. Stakeholders have been meeting for over seven years, working on ways to close the plant, and much of the leadership on the issue has come from Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who represents the Bayview district.

Cal-ISO has insisted that the only way to close Unit 3 is to build new peakers, which would be owned and operated by the city, run cleaner and more efficiently, and still supply that 150 MW of peak power. Even when the 400 MW Transbay Cable was approved, Cal-ISO insisted San Francisco would still need the peakers.

But in a June 2 letter, Cal-ISO suddenly had a different response for the Mayor.

It's very, very quiet here at City Hall, unusually quiet even for what's expected to be a low-turnout election. My sources say turnout on the west side of town is very, very low, which might not be such a bad thing .... but overeall, I'm nervous

Talking to Jim Stearns, one of the political consultants involved in what now will be the most expensive ballot campaign ever, I got an interesting perspective on G and F. Stearns says all the polling showed the measures moving together -- when the campaign pushed Yes on G, the Yes on F vote moved up, too. When they tried to trash Prop. F, the Prop. G vote went down.

So it's entirely possible that both measures will pass -- which will, of course, infuriate Lennar Corp.

Well, the minute we posted that last entry we got some absentee results -- and it looks like Lennar's money carried the day. Prop. G is winning handily, Prop. F is going down hard.

But there's fascinating news: Prop. E, the PUC reform measure that PG&E spent a fortune trying to kill, is ahead even in the absentees and will probably win.

Gerardo Sandoval is well ahead in the judicial race, but there may still be a runoff.

Leno is beating Migden handily in the city, and Joe Nation is way behind. That's good news for Leno, who needs a big win in SF to overcome what will probably be a Nation advantage in the north counties.

Remember, these are early absentees, but here's who's winning at the DCCC right now in District 13:

Leslie Katz
David Chiu
David Campos
Laura Spanjian
Aaron Peskin
Scott Wiener
Robert Haaland
Rafael Mandelman
Holli Their
Debra Walker
Michael Goldstein
Joe Julian

So far, it's most incumbents and the progressive "slate" isn't exactly winning. Chris Daly, for example, hasn't even made the cut. But the night is young and that will probably change.

Whoops, read that one wrong. Gerardo Sandoval is at 37.09 and Thomas Mellon is at 48.04, with Mary Mallen at 14.44. So Sandoval is behind. But since his numbers will rise and Mellon's will fall as the election-day results come in, it looks like a November runoff between the two.

The early absentees tell us a few things, and Chris Bowman, a GOP consulant who is generally right on his projections, gave us his hit, and here's how it looks:

Prop. A, the parcel tax for schools, is going to be very close; it's at 60 percent now and that will be a squeaker.

F and G are over. F lost, G won.

Sandoval may come in first, or at worst a close second, and that race will go to a November runoff.

Prop. E (fuck PG&E) is going to win.

There are some early returns from Marin, and it looks pretty good for Leno -- he's at 31 percent in Marin, with Migden at a low 22.4 and Nation just at 45. So it's early, but the odds of Leno pulling this out are getting better.

We have about 20 percent of the vote in now, and here's how it looks:

Prop. A has gone up to 63 percent, and will probably pass.

Sandoval has picked up a bunch, is now at almost 40 percent, and now looks to be coming in first in that race, but not with enough votes to avoid a runoff.

F is still losing, G still winning, and that won't change.

Joe Nation is now leading Mark Leno -- not in San Francisco but district wide. Must be a bunch of north bay precincts reporting, because he's doing well in SF.

County Central Committee, D 13:
Campos
Chiu
Katz
Peskin
Spanjian
Haaland
Wiener
Mandelman
Walker
Daly
Goldstein
Julian

This is a near-sweep at this point for the Peskin-Daly progressive slate; the only two people winning who weren't on the slate are Leslie Katz (former supervisor) and Scott Wiener, the DCCC chair. So this is looking very good right now, and could be a bright spot for progressives looking toward the fall supervisorial elections.

After taking heat for weeks after the Guardian failed to endorse Carole Migden, I approach her party with a bit of trepidation, particularly after seeing her trail both Mark Leno and Joe Nation in early returns. She is speaking when I arrive, saying her thank yous. "Thank you, thank you, thank you San Francisco," she closes. Afterward I see one of her most prominent supporters, Senator Darrell Steinberg, the incoming president pro tem, whom I know a little from my Sacramento days.
"She's been a great legislator and whatever happens tonight, she has everything to be proud of. I'm happy to stand with her," Steinberg tells me. I catch the latest district numbers on the screen: Leno 37.2%, Migden 30.6%, Nation 32.2%, with 3.4% of precincts reporting. Soon, I bump into the most powerful backer of Migden's legislative career, former Senator John Burton. Feeling a need to be forthright, I introduce myself and say clearly that I'm from the Bay Guardian.
"The Guardian must be overjoyed. She carried their water for 20 years and they fucked her when she needed them," Burton bellows, asking me to make sure to pass his words on to publisher Bruce Brugmann, which I'm now doing.
Carole is a bit more magnanimous. She greets me with a hug. I tell her I'm sorry we couldn't be with her, poise my notebook, and ask how she's feeling about tonight. "I feel great and I have an enthusiastic crowd and I'm very proud of my years of service," she says, nods at me, and turns away.

So breaking out the absentees, Sandoval is winning 55 percent of the Election Day vote. That should put him in a strong position going into the fall runoff. There's a third candidate in the race, Mary Mallen, who is at around 14 percent, so the incumbent, Judge Mellon, will get far less than a majority vote, indicating that most of the voters want someone else.

On Prop. A: The election-day results have Prop. A winning by 74 percent. So that should make up for the absentees quite nicely. I think A is now going to win.

Now Leno's back ahead with 37 percent of the vote (district wide) to Nation's 35.8. This one's going to be close.

In San Francisco, on Election Day, it's all Migden and Leno in San Francisco, and Leno is way ahead. Leno's got 62 percent of the San Francisco election-day vote, and Migden has 37 percent. So it's looking good for Leno, who has to win SF very big.

We showed up at Joe Nation's election night party in the Marin County town of Greenbrae around eight o'clock. The event's being held at a restaurant called the Wipe Out Bar & Grill in a quiet strip mall here. State figures are showing Leno ahead of the pack by five percentage points. By the time we arrived at Wipe Out, the candidate wasn't around.

The restaurant's proprietor, Bob Partrite, told us Nation's crew was supposed to be here at a quarter of eight. Long after the hour, Nation was still missing in action. In fact, for much of the time we were hanging around, reporters outnumbered Nation supporters, as seen in the photos below. But Wyatt Buchanan of the Chronicle insisted on acknowledging that by half past the hour, a few people were trickling in. Most of the chairs remained empty, however, and a whole bunch of utensils went unused, at least while we were there. Just sayin'.

Joe Nation's supporters weren't filling any of the chairs. Those are reporters in the background from KPFA.

We came upon stacks of unused utensils at eight o'clock when we showed, 15 minutes after the candidate was supposed to be here. But some food did start to fill plates at around 8:30. The candidate still wasn't around, however.

More empty chairs.

Mark Leno's election night party has been a stark contrast to what we saw earlier tonight at Joe Nation's event, which was situated at the unfortunately named "Wipe Out" restaurant in Greenbrae. Leno's campaign office in San Rafael is packed wall-to-wall, the crowd noisy and erupting in frequent applause when new figures from the secretary of state show up on a projector putting Leno ahead.

He told a radio reporter earlier tonight that overall during the election, he's had to raise $1.2 million (we've seen it in the piles of slick, anti-Nation mailers that have mounted in our mailbox). But he says there's got to be a way to overcome the cost of operating a modern campaign election, most of which put people with big ideas but no connections out of the bidding. Leno just thanked a litany of campaign staffers and volunteers for backing him over the last 15 months before heading off to San Francisco where we've heard he also has an event planned for the Lime club in the Castro.

We were situated in a Leno war room with campaign staffers -- including Leno's manager, Tom, described by colleagues as "eternally pessimistic" -- who still seem wary of calling the election for Leno. The numbers, however, are looking more and more inevitable. If he wins, Leno's gonna have to work on the music he rock, representing a district like this and all, which includes San Francisco. Someone just put the Dirty Dancing theme on the sound system. Not good. As far as North Bay events went tonight, Leno's has been much more electric than what Nation had going on earlier.

On the left, Leno field organizer Carole Mills, and on the right, volunteer coordinator Evelyn Woo.

Marriage equality activists and Leno supporters Dolores Caruthers, on the left, and Laura Espinoza, on the right.

Well, we got walloped on Props. G and F, but other than that, it's shaping up as a fascinating night for progressives -- and not all bad. The progressive slate nearly swept the DCCC in the 13 Assembly District. Prop. A, the school tax, won handily. Prop. E, the PUC reform, won pretty handily.

And it now appears that Mark Leno's big gamble paid off and he will be the next state Senator from District 3. And it seems like a decisive victory; with 70 percent of the precincts reporting, he's got 43 percent of the vote. At lot of progressives backed Carold Migden, and if Leno and Migden has split the vote in a way that gave Joe Nation the seat, Leno would have been blasted as the guy who, by challenging Migden, cost San Francisco and the queer community a state Senate seat.

But he didn't do that -- he pulled together the coalition he needed to defeat Nation.

He now has a huge challenge on his hands: He needs to reach out to the progressives who supported Carole Migden. How he does that (and I think this is something that Leno is good at) will define his career and success over the next few years.

Amanda Witherell calls in to report:

There's about 200 hundred people milling about optimistically at El Rio, for a party that's basically a catchall progressive fest for No on Prop 98, Yes on 99, Tom Ammiano, Gerardo Sandoval, Yes on F, No on G, and David Campos for DCCC.

Currently and unfortunately, 98 is failing swimmingly in SF but seems to be winning statewide (Ed Note -- this looks to have changed since I got Amanda's call). F is also failing in absentees. And despite the fact that Sandoval (running for judge) looks to be down right now against his opponent, Mellon, he's in a chipper mood: "I'm fully expecting to win," he says with a grin.

No balloons, but Ammiano's working the floor with some trademark comedy schtick -- he's at 97 percent, but he ran unopposed. Campos is also doing quite well, and is exuberant.

The crowd is surprisingly and inspiringly young -- many folks from the League of Pissed Off Voters. Legendary prankster/jester h. Brown has set up a table and is interviewing people, while a folk singer strums away in a corner.

The Great American Music Hall was a bit sedate when I showed up for the Yes on A party. The measure to fund teacher salaries with a parcel tax needed a two-thirds vote and it was a few points shy, but moving up since the conservative absentee ballots were counted. "I wish it weren't this close," school superintendent Carlos Garcia told me, lamenting the high vote threshold. "It's too bad. But I still have faith in San Francisco."
A few minutes later, that faith was rewarded when the new results came in: 69.6% yes with 88.8% of votes counted. The room erupted.
School board member Hydra Mendoza started to loudly whoop it up into the microphone, calling up her colleagues to say a few words and help celebrate. "These numbers show that people believe in public education. They believe in what we're doing," Garcia said. School board member Mark Sanchez recognized the measure's chief fundraiser: "Let's give a big shout out to Warren Hellman."
Mendoza closed: "Turn on the dance music. Wooooo!"

When the chill wind of early returns showed Prop. G leading Prop. F in the polls, (67 percent to 33 percent ) the folks at the Prop. F campaign HQ put it down to all the money that Lennar spent to influence the election.

Inside the Prop. F party at 5030 Third Street, supporters munched on pizza, listening to the Nation of Islam's Minister Christopher Muhammad expounding on "the $4 million of known money that Lennar has spent, not to mention the unknown slush funds."

"I'm encouraged just by the fact that we forced them to spend so much," Muhammad said, berating, "the Labor Council's leadership for selling out its leadership in a backroom deal."

Muhammad was referring to the community benefits agreement that the SF Labor Council negotiated with Lennar at the last minute, with Lennar promising to develop 32 percent affordable housing units at Bayview/Candlestick Point.

Bishop Ernest Jackson joined Muhammad in casting aspersions on Lennar 's deal with the SF Labor Council, by pointing to what he called Mayor Gavin Newsom's "secret press conference" about the 2008-09 budget at the Hunters Point Shipyard on June 2, as a clue to why Labor capitulated to Lennar and Newsom's demands.

Noting that Newsom announced his budget in a "police station surrounded by all kinds of weaponry and armored personnel carriers," Jackson claimed that Newsom "held the unions hostage".

"Newsom used the budget cuts as veiled threats over people of conscience," Jackson said. "But the Prop. F movement proves there is another constituency in the Bayview. The City had no idea it would have its own cyclone in the southeast sector. This same groundswell can look at its supervisor and say, you're not doing the right thing."

Meanwhile, Muhammad was expressing his belief that San Francisco is going to the dogs, literally, a view he aired in the heart of the Bayview, earlier this week, as the following video shows:

"There are now more dogs than blacks living in the city," Muhammad said, "San Francisco is becoming a playground for young urban multimillionaires."

Text and Photos by Umayyah Cable

Having just left the HQ of the F is for Fairness campaign in the Bayview, I must report that the vibe was generally optimistic despite the fact that Prop F was decidedly dragging it's feet through the election mud. Members of the campaign were staying positive as they gathered in a rented space on 3rd street, eagerly refreshing the SF Departments of Elections results page. Here's a glimpse of the evening:

As I was uploading these images I now find that Prop F has officially failed. Which makes the above pictures out dated and bittersweet.

While talking with members of the campaign, many of whom happen to also be members of the Grace Tabernacle Church in the Bayview, I was struck by a specific emotional aspect of Prop F that I hadn't previously considered. In speaking with Jesse, a congregation member who wore a "YES on F" T shirt in Spanish, and a windbreaker jacket proudly emblazoned with an "I voted!' sticker, I really got a sense of what this decision could actually mean for this community. Jesse spoke of raising his 9 children in the neighborhood (who are now raising his 27 grandchildren), coaching baseball, and looked on with pride and affection at the group of teenagers sitting across the hall from us.

If Lennar has its way with the Bayview and Hunter's point neighborhoods of San Francisco, all those things which Jesse and many others hold dearest to them: children, family, and fostering a tight knit community, will be replaced by an overpriced playground for yuppies. Lennar will take its mountain of paper money and replace children and community with materialism and greed. And what's a city without children? Futureless, directionless and growthless.

I must say, the results are somewhat disheartening. But given the optimism I witnessed this evening, I have some renewed faith that this community wont give up without a fight.

Lime on Market Street near Castro was crowded with Mark Leno supporters when the candidate took the microphone just before midnight. He had already taken the concession calls from Carole Migden and Joe Nation and was primed to celebrate his victory over an incumbent senator, whom Leno supporter Bevan Dufty had just taken a couple subtle digs at as he introduced Leno, suggesting that Migden didn't listen to her constituents or play by the rules.
Leno then gave a speech that demonstrated the unique package of issues, enemies and allies that he has turned into a winning coalition. "Tom Ammiano, it's gonna be a helluva lot of fun serving with you," Leno said of the man who will succeed him with his endorsement. "I just heard Prop. E passed," Leno continued, referencing the measure that will submit the mayor's SFPUC appointments to Board of Supervisors approval. "As an early supporter, I was happy to see that." That stand was already a hopeful sign of his independence from Mayor Gavin Newsom and PG&E, but then he really went after the company, which had funded a hit piece mailer by a group calling itself Californians to Protect Children, trotting out some old sleaze about Leno being soft on pedophiles because he resisted right wing efforts to capitalize on crime fears.
"When you attack one gay man like this, you attack all gay men," Leno said. "All gay men should be outraged with PG&E tonight." He thanked Dennis Kelly of United Educators of San Francisco for giving his campaign early credibility. Then Leno returned to the LGBT community, promising to heal the rift his challenge of Migden opened by leading the fight against the fall ballot measure that would ban same sex marriage. "I invite you to join together to defeat the religious right," Leno said.
He then thanked a long list of leaders who endorsed him, from Mayor Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to District Attorney Kamala Harris and former SFPUC director Susan Leal to members of the late night entertainment community, which rallied for Leno with signs on nightclubs all over town. And then he thanked his campaign consultants, the downtown darlings BMWL, affectionately naming a list of people from there and saying of the campaign they created: "It was clean, it was smart, it was effective."
And Leno's final name check was to the presidential candidate he supports, who also had a good night: "The winds of change are blowing tonight. Let me congratulate Barack Obama on his victory."

Questions were raised in court yesterday about the ability of SF Weekly and their parent company, Village Voice Media, to pay the $15.6 million judgment that the Bay Guardian won in its predatory pricing lawsuit against the chain – or even to secure the bond needed to move forward with appeals.
Weekly attorney Rod Kerr argued the defendant’s motion for a stay of the judgment until 10 days after Judge Marla Miller rules on post-trial motions. Those motions are scheduled to be heard on July 8 and the judge has 10 days to rule, meaning the enforcement of the judgment could have been delayed until July 28.
Kerr argued that turmoil in the financial markets and the need for VVM to get approval from its lenders is making it difficult to secure the bond. “Without the post trial decisions, they’re not willing to release the collateral,” he said in court. “I think it’s a very reasonable request under the circumstances.”
Kerr said he believed there was a likelihood that the judgment amount would be substantially lowered during post-trial rulings, something that the company has also represented to its lenders. The difficulty in obtaining a bond for the full amount was also emphasized in a written declaration by SF Weekly’s chief financial officer, Jed Brunst.
Guardian attorney Ralph Alldredge, speaking to the court via telephone while his co-counsels Richard Hill and Craig Moody were present, reiterated a previous offer to stay enforcement until June 18, which is 30 days after the judgment was entered following the March jury verdict.
But Alldredge said the statements and briefs by the defendants raise serious concerns about whether they’re prepared to cover the full judgment, so the Guardian needs to be able to take steps to ensure that assets are being identified and secured to satisfy the judgment.
“They anticipate post trial motions will result in a reduction of the verdict, so apparently their lenders have been told that,” Alldredge said, adding, “The lenders need to be told the judgment is likely to be the final amount.”
The combination of problems securing a bond in the full amount and the defendant’s optimistic belief that they won’t have to pay the full $15.6 million raise concerns about whether the Guardian is going to get paid, he said.
“That’s a very shaky situation and it implies some risk that the bond may never be issued,” Alldredge said.
Hill also told the court that given the fact that Village Voice Media assets are spread across a number of states, it will be a long and difficult process for the Guardian to recover its judgment if VVM isn’t able to secure a bond and a long delay now would make that even more difficult.
Judge Miller agreed with the Guardian position, granting the stay only until June 18 but allowing the defendants to return to court to ask for more time if they can provide evidence showing how it will result in a bond being issued.
“I am concerned there is a risk that the bond may never be issued, based on the declaration of Mr. Brunst,” Miller said.
The judgment was based on the verdict that SF Weekly has been engaged in illegal predatory pricing going back to the mid 1990s when it was purchased by VVM, selling advertising below the costs needed to support the paper in an effort to drive the Guardian out of business. That’s illegal under California law.
VVM is appealing the verdict, but to do so must guarantee its ability to pay the verdict plus interest that began accruing when the judgment was entered last month. Kerr’s motion also sought to delay enforcement of an injunction Miller issued that bars further below cost pricing by SF Weekly, but that portion of the motion was denied.
Both sides are due in court July 8 at 9 a.m. to argue post trials motions, including one by the defendants to throw out the verdict and order a new trial.

photo courtesy of Indybay

It looks like the city of Fresno will be writing a big fat check to 225 homeless people who sued when city workers trashed their belongings in a series of raids on encampments in 2006.

Homeless people, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and the private firm of Heller Ehrman LLP, filed a class action lawsuit against the city of Fresno and the California Department of Transportation, claiming their possessions were seized and destroyed without their notice. Back in 2006, the city was barred from continuing the raids by a preliminary injunction. And today United States District Judge Oliver W. Wanger gave preliminary approval to a $2.35 million dollar settlement for what occurred during those raids.

“It’s completely unprecedented,” LCCR’s, Anayma de Frias, told us, adding that they’d been hoping to get something, but nothing as substantial as this.

The terms are as follows:

By Marianne Moore

At the foot of the rotunda stairs in City Hall, a young bride in a short white dress shifts her weight from side to side, holding a bouquet of bright yellow lilies. Maybe she’s watching intently as the solemn procession of roughly 120 clergy and activists winds slowly up the steps and towards the bronze bust of Harvey Melk. Or maybe she’s just annoyed at being made to wait.

The demonstration, which began in the South Light Court at 10:30 on Thursday, June 5, was organized by Religious Witness for Homeless People, an interfaith organization that pushes for policy change on behalf of San Francisco’s homeless. Though Religious Witness has been responsible for hundreds of actions during its 15-year existence, including a much-publicized 1996 campaign to preserve the Presidio’s Wherry housing for low-income tenants, today’s protest was specifically directed at the ongoing budget process. The city is facing a $338 million dollar deficit, and Mayor Newsom is expected to balance the budget by cutting city funding to key service organizations. “The proposed budget is a disaster for San Francisco’s homeless,” said Sister Bernie Galvin, the founder of Religious Witness and a Catholic nun. She cited the 137 documented homeless deaths in San Francisco in 2007, suggesting that if the mayor and the board of supervisors cut crucial services, homeless deaths could rise this year.

The demonstrators processed through the corridors of city hall, singing softly, past signs reading “Silence: meeting in progress.” The procession halted outside the office doors of each of the city’s 12 supervisors, and each time Sister Bernie rapped loudly on the glass. As the door opened, retired Catholic priest John “Fitz” Fitzgerald spoke each supervisor’s name loudly, and the crowd responded in unison: “we call on you to remember that our moral compass always points in the direction of compassion.” Sister Bernie presented the supervisor with a plaque (usually accepted with an embarrassed smile by an aide) and the slow marching and singing resumed, punctuated by the sound of the heavy wooden doors slamming shut. When the demonstration reached the office of Gerardo Sandoval, the 11th district supervisor, a grinning Sandoval joined the procession, chatting with the clergy, shaking hands and clapping backs. “I’m with you one hundred percent,” he said, addressing the crowd.

This weekend came the long overdue news that Manuel Mollinedo has finally resigned as executive director of the San Francisco Zoo. Our sources say he was forced out by the San Francisco Zoological Society Board of Directors after the union representing many zoo workers overwhelmingly approved a no confidence measure against Mollinedo, who has presided over the steady deterioration of employee morale and the conditions under which the animals are kept. But it's been difficult to get anybody talking on the record because of legal warnings about how loose lips could hurt the society's efforts to fight lawsuits related to the fatal tiger mauling in December, which Mollinedo couldn't have handled worse.
The Guardian has been warning for many years that the privatized zoo was bad for the city and worse for the animals. Unless the Zoological Society can use this opportunity to take the zoo in a drastically different direction -- with more focus on animal welfare, greater pay equity between the director and employees, and a commitment to more public accountability -- maybe it's time to start talking about reclaiming the zoo as the public institution that it once was.

By Marianne Moore

Meghan McCain, the senator’s young, hot, keffiyeh-wearing daughter, has taken to blogging from the campaign trail, and the media is lapping it up: depending on who you read she’s alternately “hilarious,” “refreshing,” or even “adorable.” Lest you be seduced by the blog’s seemingly innocent, light-hearted descriptions of bad campaign food or the Governator’s neckwear, find below the tools you need to remain ruthlessly scowling at Meggers and her Daddy.

1. Revolting Fake Hipness

In addition to sharing her observations and insights from the road, Meghan also graces us with her iTunes playlists, a sure way to show us that she’s down. The playlists are a truly bizarre mix of predictable indie bands (Architecture in Helsinki, Neutral Milk Hotel, Broken Social Scene: seriously, it’s like she hired a consultant) older artists (David Bowie, Stevie Wonder), shite (Rod Stewart), and music a Republican just has no business listening to (Joni Mitchell, Iggy Pop). Really, she can listen to whatever she wants; I guess what I object to is Meggers turning some of my favorite artists into hollow McCain shills, just like I generally object to the pollution and degradation of things I hold sacred.

According to a hysterically enthusiastic article in Britain’s The Observer, Meghan has single-handedly “reinvented the campaign blog” and “injected [McCain’s] political persona with some much-needed street cred.” Right. Because nothing says street cred like private jets, ditzy gushing over mass murderer Henry Kissinger’s loafers, and “self-deprecating” admissions of Starbucks addiction.

Shannon Bae shows us What Asian People Like: Soda! John McCain!

Wouldn't a martial-arts program be a better option?(Photo of Master Jung from Koreanmartialarts.com

Okay, I'm all for getting rid of JROTC in the public schools. But I also recognize that there are some kids -- about 1,600 -- who like the program and get something out of it.

So the School Board has been looking around for an alternative -- and I'm sorry, but this is never going to work.

Ethnic studies is a great idea, and ought to be part of the SFUSD curriculum. But the kids and parents who support JROTC aren't going to see it as a viable alternative. And it's pretty clear why.

Ethnic studies sounds like a class. JROTC is popular in some circles because it's not just classroom education. It's physical activity, it's fun, it's leadership development and it has a community-building element. The most popular part of the program, I'm told, is the marching band.

You need something that offers the same sort of attractions, but isn't a military recruitment tool. And it seems to me there are plenty of options.

School Board members have talked about trying to find a program that feeds into the San Francisco Fire Department or even the Police Department. I don't love the police option, but hey: Better to get kids interested in law enforcement than in the Army (and it might actually help San Francisco recruit some local people with community roots to be police officers). And a junior firefighter-paramedic program would have all kinds of benefits. The district hasn't been able to work anything out with those options, though, in part because there's no existing infrastucture; you can't send 14-year-olds to the Police Academy, and the city's paramedic classes are limited to people 18 and older.

But there's another solution, too -- and it seems pretty obvious to me.

San Francisco already has at least 50 good martial-arts schools and clubs that teach kids. I've been involved in Tae Kwon Do for almost 20 years, and my son is now a student at the Korean Martial Arts Center , and I can tell you that these classes offer physical fitness, confidence building, leadership development, and create communities and team spirit. You get uniforms. You learn to respect yourself and others. Good programs, and there are plenty around, teach conflict resolution and nonviolence.

And it's fun and really cool.

Best of all, the infrastructure already exists.

The SFUSD spends $800,000 a year on JROTC. Most martial arts clubs in San Francisco are financially modest operations, and most instructors aren't in if for the money. Getting a group of local martial arts clubs to set up satellite programs in the schools would be cheap. (The schools already have facilities and insurance, and the uniforms and equipment are -- by the standards of what we spend on JROTC -- inexpensive.

The kids now get phys ed credit for JROTC -- another big attraction -- but that's a stretch anyway, since the state now requires phys ed teachers to have a California teaching certificate and none of the JROTC instructors qualify. Figure out a way around that for martial-arts instructors and you'd have it made.

I called Jane Kim, a school board member who's on the curriculum committee, and she told me she was a little startled by the Ethnic Studies proposal, too. "We've been pushing the district to create an Ethnic Studies plan for a long time now," she said, "but I was surprised to see that they combined that with replacing JROTC." She's a little dubious about this plan, too.

"We're going to keep the marching band, though," she said. "That's a given."

Which is a start.

As I prepare to attend next week's International Towards Carfree Cities Conference in Portland (from which I'll be doing daily posts on this blog) -- traveling up by train with a big group of bicyclists and alternative transportation activists from San Francisco -- the newsgroups and carfree living websites have been abuzz over this simple image:

Why go gaga over a presidential candidate on a bike? After all, John Kerry rode one and President Bush reportedly takes regular mountain bike rides. The difference for those who promote bicycling as a viable urban transportation option is that Obama rode in a big city, in street clothes, on an inexpensive bike, and was even hauling something (probably his daughter, although that isn't clear). And he chose to spend his downtime cycling through Chicago with his family shortly after saying this in Portland: "If we are going to solve our energy problems we’ve got to think long term. It’s time for us to be serious about investing in alternative energy. It’s time for us to get serious about raising fuel efficiency standards on cars. It’s time that the entire country learn from what’s happening right here in Portland with mass transit and bicycle lanes and funding alternative means of transportation."
Contrast that with today's news that Senate Republicans have blocked legislation that would have taxed the obscene profits now been reaped by the five big largest American oil companies, which took in a staggering $36 billion in just the first three months of this year. Just imagine how many bike lanes and transit improvements could be funded with the proposed 25 percent tax on unreasonably high profit levels? Or by getting out of Iraq, with its price tag of more than $250 million per day?
Forget the detailed analysis of their economic plans; the differing visions of these two men couldn't be more clear. We either keep cooking the planet, fighting the world, and begging the rich for crumbs and spare change, or we try something different.

Sup. Chris Daly wants an immediate hearing into the fiscal health of Lennar’s construction project at Hunters Point Shipyard, (you know, the one where they repeatedly messed up the asbestos dust monitoring).

Daly made his request at the June 10 Board of Supervisors meeting, following the discovery that the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency has applied for, but has so far been denied, a $25 million grant to subsidize infrastructure costs at the site.

The agency filed its grant application with the California Department of Housing and Community Development in April 2008. During that same period, Lennar spent an estimated $5 million to successfully persuade voters to support Proposition G, which will allow Lennar to develop luxury condos at Candlestick Point, as well as at the Shipyard.

(At the last minute, Lennar appeared to sweeten Prop.G's terms, by negotiating a community benefits deal with the San Francisco Labor Council, including promises of 32 percent affordable housing and job creation investment. But tthe deal stretches the definition of "affordable" to way above what your average Bayview Hunters Point resident earns. And it only becomes legally binding, if, and when, something gets built at Candlestick/Hunters Point.)

Holding up a big fat binder, stufed with spreadsheets, financial data and grant applications, Daly read aloud to his fellow supervisors from documents that suggest that there is a serious financial shortfall at the Parcel A site, where Lennar graded an entire hillside in preparation for developing a 1,500 unit condominium complex.

“This raises questions about Parcel A and the mixed use project,” said Daly, citing from documnents that claim that the receipt of gap funding, "will restore the ability of the SFRA and the Developer to continue the development.g

As the agency's own grant application states, "The Gap Funding in the amount of $25,021,079 provided by the infill infrastructure grant will enable the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the land master developer to continue the development of the Shipyard.”

“The infill infrastructure grant will be instrumental in moving forward the Capital Improvement Project in light of exisiting market conditions and increased construction costs.”

“Without the receipt of the grant, it will face delays in the timing of the completion of the infrastructure and creation of much needed parks.”

Hmm.

Daly’s cache of documents also reveal that the Shipyard Legacy Fund has shrunk from $30 million to $5 million. This raises serious doubts about the City’s ability to deliver on a list of promised community benefits at the Shipyard.
According to the SFRA's own documents, "The Legacy fund is charged with reinvestment of the Agency’s proceeds from net land sales back into the BVHP community with an emphasis on employment, housing and financial/asset development, youth development, elder services, arts/culture & recreation and environment/safety."

Stay tuned.

"There are so many things on the chopping block that this seems out of whack.”

So said Sup. Tom Ammiano at yesterday’s Board hearing on the Mayor's Community Justice Center, sounding diplomatic compared to some of the pointier comments that his fellow supervisors made, as the Board voted 7-3 to send Newsom's $2.8 million CJC back to committee.

But then again, all the supervisors sounded outspoken compared to Sup. Geraldo Sandoval, who recused himselffrom the discussion , on the grounds that he is running for judge. (Sandoval’s absence felt even more ironic as the hearing progressed and a couple of sitting judges spoke in favor of the center.)

Now, everyone knows that wannabe governor Mayor Gavin Newsom has been itching to add the CJC t to his political resume ever since visiting a similar one in New York.

While PG&E is requesting the California Public Utilities Commission allow them a 6.5 percent electricity rate hike over the next six months, ostensibly to cover skyrocketing natural gas prices, they’re telling local citizens they’re expecting prices to drop.

In Marin County, our neighbors to the north have been listening to PG&E lobbyists criticize their county's plan to provide 100 percent renewable energy to residents through Community Choice Aggregation. Their CCA plan, called Marin Clean Energy, will offer customers 25 percent renewable energy by 2009 twice what PG&E offers, and for the same rate. Customers who want to pay a little more can go 100 percent renewable right out of the gate. Ultimately, they'll scale the 25 up to 51 percent by 2013, and 100 percent thereafter.

Marin argues that 100 percent renewable energy is a more fiscally responsible way to go – precisely because natural gas prices are volatile and will continue to rise. But PG&E says Marin's plan is too risky and too costly. You can read PG&E’s critique of the plan, and Marin’s apt rebuttal, here.

But recent testimony from Dawn Weisz, MCE’s planner, sums it up pretty succinctly.

“Their [PG&E's] main criticism is that we won’t be able to achieve the cost benefits,” Weisz told a May 23, 2008 meeting of San Francisco’s Local Agency Formation Commission, who had invited her to brief them on their CCA’s progress. Weisz said they had an independent third party analyze the CCA plan and PG&E’s critique.

The analyst found a key flaw in PG&E’s logic. “They’re using a gas forecast that assumes gas will be 14 percent cheaper in 12 years,” Weisz said.

At this, the entire LAFCO board broke out in laughter. Any sane person knows that isn’t going to happen. As Weisz pointed out, natural gas prices rose an average of 30 percent over the last five years, and as the San Francisco Chronicle reported today, they’re 63 percent higher than they were a year ago. Natural gas is a fossil fuel just like crude oil, and speculators are having their day with it, too.

But PG&E is using their estimate to contend their prices will be cheaper than MCE's over the long run, so you best not switch services. And as we can see from the awkwardly placed chart to the left, PG&E"s rates have only and ever gone up.

As PG&E continues to cling to their fossil fuel infrastructure, and combats communities who attempt to prove viable, renewable alternatives are possible, we should expect to see PG&E pleading at the CPUC for more and more rate hikes.

Last night, I was reminded of the old joke that people who like sausage and appreciate politics shouldn't watch either one being made.
Less than a week after winning a majority of the seats on the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, the progressive-minded “Hope Slate” candidates (all of which were endorsed by the Guardian) descended into bitter infighting over who to back for the powerful chair of the DCCC.
The acrimony began when Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, whose 23,049 DCCC votes was second only to David Campos (whose run for supervisor this fall would conflict with running the DCCC), resisted calls to run for the chair, much to the consternation of progressive stalwarts such as Chris Daly and Robert Haaland.
Some Hope Slate candidates, such as Laura Spanjian, were apparently supporting a play by Assembly member turned Senator-to-be Mark Leno to have moderate Scott Wiener continue as the DCCC chair, despite the fact that he wasn’t part of the winning slate and he finished in 10th place in the DCCC District 13 race.
And for awhile there, Peskin seemed to be going along the Leno’s play, arguing that progressives should adopt a conciliatory posture. So the candidates gathered together last night at the 500 Club to hash out their differences, and I had a front row seat for a discussion that turned nasty – with Daly shouting at Peskin and Spanjian and then storming out of the room.
But today, as cooler heads prevailed, Peskin has decided to run, telling me, “Yes, it is true, I am running.”

It’s one of California’s oldest prisons still in operation if not the oldest. The San Quentin State Prison was first built in July of 1852 at Point Quentin in Marin County just north of here on more than 400 pristine acres of Northern California land.

It’s history is illustrious. Johnny Cash performed a live concert there in 1969, you might have heard. Metallica shot the video for “St. Anger” there as well in 2003, which would have been a lot cooler if it was 20 years before and the song was “Dyers Eve,” but whatever.

San Quentin’s also the place where the major news cable networks like to go when they want to do a two-hour reality special titled something like “Dudes Looking Murderous in Front of a Camera While a Voiceover Describes the Prison’s Simple Day-to-Day Operations, But No One’s Really Paying Attention to the Reporter Because They’re Engrossed by the Distant Prospect That the Guy With Tattoos on His Head Playing Cards Might at Any Moment Stab in the Throat the Guy Playing Bones Nearby.”

Larry King did one recently where he kept asking a group of pre-selected inmates to detail their stories of prison rape and clandestine drug use, but they mostly wanted to talk about rehabilitation and missing their kids.

Anyway, San Quentin also houses all of California’s male condemned inmates, the people scheduled to be executed for committing murder and/or littering in Marin County and/or not voting for Mark Leno. Pumping poison into condemned jail inmates is a costly business, more costly than simply jailing them for life, anti-death penalty advocates contend, if you factor in all of the appeals and the special housing requirements.

Metallica in San Quentin

The question may seem strange to voters who just gave Lennar the green light to redevelop the Shipyard and Candlestick Point by voting Yes on Proposition G.

But it sure looks like there’s a major financial problem at Lennar’s construction site on Parcel A of the Shipyard ( the first piece of land on the former naval base to be developed), judging from documents obtained from the City.

“Without the requested $25,021,079 Infill grant allocation, our infrastructure project faces a serious risk of being mothballed,” wrote Stephen Maduli-Williams, Deputy Executive Director of Community and Economic Development for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, on May 23, 2008. “The project would face increased costs from work stoppage, remobilization efforts and substantial change orders.”

Maduli-Williams was writing to Wanda Yepez, a grant program manager at the California Department of Housing and Community Development, to appeal a grant application that Yepez determined as ineligible a week earlier, on May 16, 2008.

In his May 23 appeal, Maduli Williams stated that, “In addition to setting national benchmarks in the percentage (in terms of total units developed) and affordability level of housing units created, this project sets benchmarks with its level of developer commitment/investment as well as other community benefits (Legacy Fund).”

Stephen Seewer, the LGBT chair of the Commonwealth Club, called to tip me off to a big story that the media missed: Sup. Bevan Dufty announced on Monday at the Commonwealth Club that he's running for mayor of San Francisco! Political watchers have long known this was a possibility, but how did we miss such an important announcement?
So I spoke with Dufty, who told me that he is indeed thinking about it, but far from making it official: "I don't feel like it was a formal announcement."
Dufty said Seewer caught him off-guard at the event with a question about whether he plans to run for mayor. Dufty says he answered by talking about the ambitious agenda he intends to pursue over the next two years and, as he tells it to us, he then told the audience, "Hopefully, I'll look like a strong candidate for mayor."
OK, maybe that's not quite an official declaration, but it's no secret that Dufty has his eye on the job. Others who seems to be setting themselves up for a run and have made similar statements of interest include Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, Sup. Aaron Peskin, and District Attorney Kamala Harris (provided she doesn't get tapped by President Barack Obama to be attorney general). And I wouldn't be surprised if Senator Carole Migden takes a step back after losing reelection, licks her wounds, and returns to the fray as a mayoral candidate.

Carfree – it’s a word that is not part of the American lexicon. Even breaking the word apart – car free – won’t much help the average automobile-dependent U.S. resident intuit its meaning. If the concept seems foreign, that’s because it is.

The World Carfree Network started in Europe more than 10 years ago to, according to its mission statement, “bring together organizations and individuals dedicated to promoting alternatives to car dependence and automobile-based planning at the international level and working to reduce the human impact on the natural environment while improving the quality of life for all.”

But just as Americans begin to seriously grapple with global warming, high gasoline prices, and hopelessly congested roadways, the carfree concept and its adherents are establishing a beachhead here. The group’s eighth annual conference, Towards Carfree Cities, begins Monday in Portland, Oregon, the first time it’s been in the U.S.

And San Francisco activists are hoping to use the occasion to firmly plant the “carfree” word and concept in the minds of local planners and politicians, a cause the Guardian will help promote with daily coverage from the week-long conference.

Egads! The company that makes my favorite beer may be taken over by a Belgian brewer!

And sales are down 1.4 percent this year!

I'm sorry, Mr. August Busch IV -- I'm drinking as much Bud Light as I can!

How can we allow this timeless icon of America be sold off to the makers of (gasp!) Stella Artois?

Forget the war, the budget, crime and poverty -- the is BEER we're talking about. To the ramparts!

Just as folks in San Francisco are beginning to wonder if Lennar is planning to mothball the Hunters Point Shipyard in face of a $25 million funding gap (reportedly related to lowered land prices), comes word that folks in Vallejo are beginning to wonder what Lennar Mare Island’s June 8 bankruptcy will means for their city's already strained finances.

On Sunday June 8, Lennar Mare Island LLC, which has been involved in redeveloping the former naval station at Mare Island for eleven years. petitioned for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, along with its parent company LandSource and 19 other Lennar-related subsidiaries.

The move came several couple of months after LandSource defaulted on a $1.24 billion loan--and five days after the June 3 election, in which Lennar Homes of California spent $5 million to pass Prop. G, which gives it the right to develop luxury condos at Candlestick Point, as well as at Hunters Point Shipyard.

OK, so this is it. This is the day I'm finally equal. No longer a "second class citizen" -- in California at least, the third biggest state with the largest population in the good ol' US of Gay. Today at 5pm, two precious octagenarian lesbians will legally tie the knot at San Francisco City Hall, and tomorrow I'll have access to the last state right denied to me on the basis of which side I butter my queer toast. Weird.

Will I suddenly walk taller? Will my shoulders expand and my chest inflate? Will I finally fall prey to all that Sex and the City hoo-ha and watch my moods swing from Blahnik pump to Wang gown with every hysterical cosmo and Cosmo I down? Or will I become the stereotypical male role model -- unable to commit to an ice cream flavor or credit card company, let alone matrimony.

Gurl, we already had Sex and the City in the '40s. From www.queermusicheritage.us

Maybe worse, as someone whose queer identity was partly formed by saying "who cares" to marriage, because there's more pressing problems confronting the community -- now that that stance is officially a personal rather than a political statement, what will happen to my politics? "Who cares."

Mostly, and oddly, though, I found myself waking up this morning itching for a fight.

Steve Jones reports from the Towards Carfree Cities conference.

Our crew includes (from left) Jon Winston, Nancy Bodkin, Jason Henderson, and Brian Smith.

“We’ve got a runner,” the train conductor said over the PA system as we pulled out of Eugene, Oregon for the final leg of our overnight train from Oakland to Portland. Someone seeking good coffee had missed the train and was fruitlessly trying to catch up to us.

I was with a large contingent of Bay Area transportation policy experts, activists and thinkers – all bound for the Towards Carfree Cities conference -- and we laughed. Then we laughed harder once we realized that Jason Henderson, a geography professor at San Francisco State, was no longer with us. Shit, we chortled, Jason didn’t make the train.

Co-conductor Justin Clark, who is just 22 but has been working for Amtrak for two years, walked by the aisle so I asked him what happened. “He decided to go to the coffee stand a block and a half up the street. I saw him running with the coffee in his hand,” Clark told me. He radioed conductor Archie Club, “and he said it was too late.” Clark said he might have stopped the train if it was his call, but it wasn’t.

“We don’t do it for fun,” Clark, whose tongue was pierced, said of leaving passengers behind and watching them run for the train. In fact, Clark felt a little bad as he stood in the doorway, watching the passenger try to stop the train: “I had to look away. I didn’t want him to see that I saw him.”

The trip had been a smooth one so far, leaving the Bay Area only a few minutes late, a sharp contrast to Amtrak’s reputation for long delayed trains, something activist Brian Smith connected to our runner: “That’s Amtrak’s new commitment to on-time efficiency.”

Jason walked up part way through my interview, so our crew was intact after all, soon to arrive for a big week in Portland.

Dear Geeks,

Never mind about the pressing matter of whether the White House should be required to turn over records about a stash of possibly missing e-mails.

No my question is purely technical, but pertinent, me thinks, to all of us who are hunting information in the digital era, (as well as to those of use who are trying to hide our tracks.)

So, please say it ain’t so that the White House could lose any e-mails. Let alone e-mails from when Bush decided to go to war with Iraq, and White House officials decided to leak the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame and the Justice Department began a criminal investigation into who leaked that classified information.”

Please, please, say it ain’t so. Because if it is...then surely, the electronic ground rules just changed?

Steven T. Jones reports from the Towards Carfree Cities conference.

San Francisco architect David Baker depaves.

Depaving Day opened the Towards Carfree Cities conference here in Portland yesterday. One might call it a soft opening, given today’s kickoff speakers, if not for the hard work involved. With pry bars and shovels they tore up the pre-sectioned asphalt, turning a paved lot along the Williams Avenue bike route in North Portland into the precursor of a community garden.
Why? Because “asphalt is ugly,” Cassandra Griffith with the nonprofit Depave.org told the crowd, most of whom had already signed the waivers to volunteer in the transformation. “Besides being ugly, it’s not super eco-friendly.”

Indeed, she said the soil, fruit trees, and cover crops to come will help absorb the stormwater for both that property and a few of its neighbors. This is the first project for this depaving group, a genre within the larger carfree community here in Portland, but Gritth said, “We want to do a few demonstration projects and then we want to encourage everyone to do it at home.”

One of the depaving workers who calls San Francisco “home,” architect David Baker, was bleeding from the shin but still hauling wheelbarrows full of busted pavement to the bin. “It’s a good thing to do and a great way to kickoff the conference,” he told me.

Later, he was part of the group that had lunch back at my place for the week, the White Eagle Café, Saloon, and Hotel, before taking off on an afternoon bicycle adventure that took us on a tour of more depaved spots – after tending to a bloody victim of clash between bicycling and Portland’s extensive rail system.

Chalk this one up in the “take nothing for granted” category.

The Board of Supervisors at today’s meeting gave an empty seat on the Sunshine Task Force to James Knoebber, rather than David Waggoner -- the candidate recommended by Rules Committee. The switch came from Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who happens to be sitting on the opposite side of the courtroom as Waggoner in a case currently before the Ethics Commission.

Yet, there was no discussion about the amendment from Elsbernd to vote in Knoebber over Waggoner. The supes voted 9-1 in favor of Knoebber, ignoring the recommendation from the Rules Committee.

As one witness told us, “Nobody said anything except Elsbernd. They just voted. It smacked of an insider deal. The proper thing to do would be to send it back to Rules.”

On May 15, the Rules Committee (comprised of Ammiano, Dufty, and Daly) recommended Waggoner to the seat -- an attorney with experience using the Sunshine Ordinance and who other task force members had looked forward to working with.

Waggoner expressed some shock at the news. “I don’t really know the back story yet. I don’t know why the supervisors changed their votes,” he told us. “At the Rule Committee, the conversation was about former chair Doug Comstock [the incumbent for the seat] and myself. They barely discussed the other candidate.”

“Supervisor Daly in particular mentioned I was very well qualified,” he recalled.

Daly is apparently the only one that stuck to his guns and was the lone dissent on the vote (though Maxwell was out of the room.)

A call of Ammiano on why he changed his vote has not been returned.

But here’s the back story:

The remarkable logic behind the historic legal decision

By Melissa Griffin of sweetmelissa.typepad.com. For more same-sex marriage photos, stories, and coverage than you can shake a lesbian stick at, visit our Guardian's SF blog.

Photo by Charles Russo

I am positively giddy! As of yesterday at 5 p.m., the California State Supreme Court's May 15th same-sex marriage ruling took effect. The County Clerk's office began issuing marriage licenses at 5:01 p.m.

In this post, I’ma try to give you the basic reasoning in the ruling (which is here: Download supreme_court_opinion.pdf). Obviously, squeezing the 121-page ruling into a three-page word document necessitated leaving out a number of nuances. Specifically, I’ve tried to give you the affirmative reasoning here and will follow-up with a second piece on how the Court shot down the arguments against gay marriage.

As I walked to City Hall from the BART station yesterday to witness this marvelous moment, the first sign I saw was a large yelIow one that read “Recriminalize Sodomy.” And I had to chuckle because these folks had clearly not read the decision.

See, the California State Supreme Court’s decision contains a Technicolor “Eff You” that beats any chant or hiss I could muster. Not only did the Court summarily reject the notion that heterosexuals would be harmed by extending to gay people the right to marry, it also made quick work of the defendants’ argument that “tradition” is somehow a rational justification for preserving heterosexual marriage.

Thanks to prior civil rights movements, court cases are rife with precedent for change in the traditional way things have been done. (Women being afforded the right to serve on juries, for example.) One chant aimed at the religious folks holding anti-gay signs on steps of City Hall could have been written by the justices themselves:

“Racist, sexist, anti-gay; fascist Christians go away!”

Spencer Jones and Tyler Barrick, newly wed, June 17, 2008.

It’s their stories that bring you to tears, stories of love, commitment and a desire to wed that would all be very ordinary, except that these people are entering into state sanctioned same-sex marriages for the very first time. (For many more pictures and stories, visit our Guardian's SF blog.)

“Amazing” says a youthful Tyler Barrick. “Overwhelming,” says the equally youthful Spencer Jones, as they emerge from the cool marble of San Francisco City Hall into the bright light of noon, June 17, 2008, as husband and husband for the very first time.

“This is our first, and hopefully, only attempt we’re going to make at marriage,” Jones says.

Inside City Hall, an immaculately dressed Paul Stevens and Ron Weaver are preparing to wed for the second time. Their first time occured February 13, 2004, when a newly sworn in Mayor Gavin Newsom decided to conduct same sex marriages at City Hall, stunning an entire nation and delighting its gay and lesbian communities.

Stevens and Weaver meet some of the running dogs of the media, inside City Hall
“We heard about it coming into work and we got married in our work clothes,” Weaver laughs, recalling that first happy wedding day.

In a relationship with Stevens for 17 years, Weaver also recalls becoming really depressed when their first marriage was nullified, on August 12, 2004, six months after their first fantastically spontaneous wedding day.

“I laid around for several days, I felt society had let me down, I took it very personally, I felt I was not good enough in their eyes,” Weaver says.

“I was surprised at my reaction to that first wedding,” Weaver adds. “I felt like a different person, so complete. I didn’t know that would happen , so when it was taken away from me, I felt as if the whole country was against me.”

Sharon Papo and Amber Weiss seal their marriage with a kiss.

Steven T. Jones reports from the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland

“We’re not doing enough,” Gil Peñalosa told the Towards Carfree Cities conference during his keynote speech yesterday. Cities are facing multiple crises connected to over-reliance on the automobile – declining public health, environmental degradation, resource depletion, loss of community, not enough space in U.S. cities to handle the 100 million people they’ll need to accommodate in the next 35 years – and most are responding with baby steps that deny the scope of the challenge our species in facing.

Peñalosa is sort of a rock star among the carfree set. After spearheading the transformation of his native Bogota, Columbia into a healthy, forward-thinking community by overhauling parks and roadways and pioneering the carfree “Ciclovia” concept that San Francisco is now adopting, Peñalosa took to the international stage, serving as executive director of Walk and Bike for Life and working closely with pioneering urban design firms such as Gehl Architects.

Unlike many European cities that have aggressively moved beyond automobile-centered development models, Peñalosa said no U.S. city has demonstrated the political will to make carfree living a realistic option for all their citizens, particularly the very young and very old. He congratulated Portland for recently receiving the top-tier platinum designation for bicycle friendly cities from the League of American Bicyclists.

That’s very good, but he noted that it’s tough to go from good to great, which is what needs to happen now if we’re to slow global warming, reverse obesity trends, and prevent soul-sapping gridlock in our cities. “The reality is Portland is far from being great,” Peñalosa said. “You are only good. You’re far from being great.” He also commended New York City for announcing just a day earlier that much of Manhatten will be carfree for three days this summer. But again, good, not great.

San Francisco, by the way, is a tier below Portland’s platinum with a ranking of gold. Sure, we’re doing a Ciclovia for three days this August and talking about a congestion pricing fee for driving downtown (something New York City recently tried and failed to implement). But compared to cities such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Vancouver, Barcelona, and Melbourne – where well over half of all trips are taken by foot, transit or bicycle and the populations are far healthier – San Francisco, New York City, and Portland are living in the last century. He said it’s time for the best U.S. cities to start playing at the level of their international counterparts.

“That’s where Portland belongs and that’s the challenge,” Peñalosa said. “Under existing conditions, we have to make major leaps instead of baby steps.”

A two-day Theatre of the Oppressed workshop is coming to the Bay Area in July. It's open to anyone interested in learning how to use theatre as a way to get people to understand and care about social, environmental, and political justice issues. It's been used in prisons, schools, war zones, rural villages, and urban streets. Founded in 1970 in Brazil by Augusto Boal, it's now an international movement. There's a short but sweet history of it here.

In short, it's pretty frickin' cool.

Details and how to apply in the jump.

By Mara Math

An official contingent of Barack Obama supporters will be marching in the Pride Parade next weekend -- but they've been told not to wear campaign buttons or t-shirts and not to carry campaign signs.

An internal email from Rebecca Prozan, a member of Obama’s national LGBT leadership committee, went out June 15th asking participants in the Obama contingent at this year's parade to "refrain from wearing campaign-related materials in the march . . . to make sure the parade does not lose funds as a result of our participation.”

That surprised a lot of activists: The parade has always had its share of political campaigns. And some worried that the Obama camp, which has so far refused to support same-sex marriage, wanted to keep its distance from the community.

But the decision actually came from the Pride Foundation, which runs the parade. Pride argues that allowing direct promotion of one particular candidate would interfere with the group's tax-exempt status and would violate the conditions of a $77,000 annual grant from Grants for the Arts, which administers the city's hotel tax funds. And because of the group's tax-exempt status,

In fact, Brendan Behan, Pride's community mobilization specialist, told us that "Obama contingent participants can wear T-shirts of Obama as a senator from Illinois, but not as a presidential candidate."
As a nonprofit education group with a 501 c tax exemption, Pride can spend a tiny fraction of its budget on lobbying or campaigning. The city's rules also prohibit allowing unequal access to any one party or lobbying group.

It's hard to make the unequal-access point stick, since queer supporters of John McCain could also march in the parade. But Pride Executive Director Lindsey Jones put it this way: "They have equal access to not campaign."
Jones, who has been at the helm for five years, told us she didn't recall any active campaigning at the parade. "We only have four years of notes in our records," she said. "Maybe it's happened in the past, but we're all fallible."

Sup. Tom Ammiano told us that the rules have been in place for years, but people have always found ways around them. "The first time I ran for School Board, we'd made a big school bus and they told us we couldn't use it because I was a candidate," he said. "So we made a big fuss and in the end the put us last in the parade."
In other years, he said, "supporters of a candidate can just march along on the sidewalk. And sometimes they slip in and join you, and it's not a big deal."

Attorney Randy Shaw, founder of the nonprofit Tenderloin Housing Clinic, told us he thinks Pride's stance is misinterpretation of the law: "Clearly, no public funds can go toward sponsoring a political activity. But funds are sponsoring security, bathrooms, publicity, insurance etc.--- participants are not being "subsidized."
In fact, he said, "event organizers have no ability to enforce such a restriction, so it clearly is not covered by city restrictions on the use of public funds."

Jones disagrees: "When the Obama campaign questioned our guidelines, it was the first time we'd had a significant challenge to those guidelines, so I had people doing research, and the City Attorney affirmed our interpretation."
"There's a difference between having a standard guideline that we inform people about, and it's another whether we follow it," Jones was quick to add. "It's not an expectation of Grants for the Arts that we have an entire enforcement squad."

Prozan has a similar view. "If someone shows up to march in an Obama '08 shirt," she told us, "I'm not going to tell them to take it off unless they're sweating."

"To me it's an issue of freedom of speech, what some people would call a Constitutional issue," says activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca, an original member of Gay Liberation and a queer activist for almost four decades. "This is really discouraging coming from a community that in the past has itself been the victim of attempts to restrict its freedom of speech. Is $77,000 worth selling out for?"

To the question of whether the gain is worth the strain, Jones responds, "It's the responsibility of the community to make the changes they want to see." The Parade is 38 years old, she notes, and began as a gathering of 200 people; today, thanks to community demand, it has 20 stages and more than three-quarters of a million attendees.
The Parade has only had Grants for the Arts funding for 10 years. "If we come to feel that we need to forego that $77,000--that's how Pride changes. Every conversation we have, including this interview, changes Pride."

She urged those interested to "Pick up the phone and call me."

You can also email her at info@sfpride.org

Bridal Money bags are sexy, budget documents ain't.

As LGBT couples were praising Mayor Gavin Newsom for making legally wedded bliss a reality in their lifetimes, a parallel community inside City Hall was criticizing the Mayor for making potentially fatal cuts to public health programs, many of which have served San Francisco’s LGBT community for decades.

Unfortunately, between all the gay marriage hoopla going on in the marble corridors of City Hall, and the burn out that non-profits are already feeling having suffered crippling mid-year cuts, there was an unprecedented feeling of doom and gloom during this year’s Beilensen Hearing inside the Board of Supervisors’s chambers.

The Beilensen Hearings, which the state requires when cuts are proposed to public health programs and services, have become an annual dance, which goes like this: first the Mayor proposes massive cuts, then the Board tries to restore funds, next competing rallies are held, and finally most of the programs are restored,

Only this year, there is little to no money to be found.

During his June 2 budget annoucement, Mayor Gavin Newsom pointed out that while the City is facing a record $338 million deficit, it is also is seeing healthy increases in tax revenues.

So, why such a massive imbalance this year? Newsom claims we are spending more than we are taking in, but that answer sidesteps the political reality of just why that is happening on such a greater scale, this year.

The answer to that question lies in two directions: Newsom’s approval, and the Board’s largely unflinching support (Sup. Chris Daly was the lone dissenting voice) for union contracts last summer, when the Mayor was up for reelection; and Newsom and the Board’s failure to introduce legislation last year to create new revenue streams to make up for the increasing slice of funds that those same union contracts, predictably, are swallowing up.

To their credit, Board President Aaron Peskin (who celebrated his birthday June 17, just as gay marriage mania was hitting City Hall big time) and Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who chairs the Board’s powerful Budget and Finance Committee, have now bitten the bullet and introduced legislation that seeks to increase property transfer taxes and close the pay roll tax partnership loophole.

But even if these measures are approved, (and that's a big if, they won’t ease this year’s budget pains.

What could help, on a more immediate level, is the identification of significant savings within the Mayor’s proposed 2008-09 budget. And to that end Budget Committee chair McGoldrick has dug his claws deep into Newsom’s proposed budget document and drawn blood.

This blood letting began ast week, when McGoldrick led the charge against funding the Mayor’s proposed $3 million Community Justice Center. (The proposal got sent back to committee where it will likely fester, and the Mayor has responded by placing a measure on the November ballot that would allocate $1.8 Million in city funds and earmark an additional $984,000 in federal grant money to create the proposed center.)

And at yesterday’s Board meeting, McGoldrick told me that he has identified potential savings of $8-10 million from the San Francisco Police Department, including eliminating over staffing as well as defunding two out of the Mayor's three proposed police academies.

“Any claims that they are understaffed are not true,” said McGoldrick, who says he came to this conclusion by factoring in 129 civilianized positions into SFPD staffing totals.

“And I’ve already told the Mayor and the Chief of Police that they are not going to get three police academies, and that the Mayor’s 311 Center is not getting 26 new positions,” McGoldrick continued. “We are going to have to figure out a more efficient way to run it. This is all about priorities. My priorities are the sick, the shut-ins, the elderly, children, the mentally ill and the victims of domestic violence.”

Meanwhile, Sup. Chris Daly extracted hollow laughs when he announced that he would not make the exact same speech as he did at last year’s Beilenson Hearing.

Daly was referring to his now infamous speech in which he referred to “allegations of cocaine use,”—allegations that were whispered around town, after it was revealed that Newsom had had an adulterous affair with the wife of his then campaign manager Alex Tourk, but that were never proven and thus would have been better left unmentioned in a public hearing that was seeking to illuminate Newsom’s wacky budget priorities..

But because Daly mentioned them, the media, which doesn’t like covering budget hearings, since there’s nothing sexy about covering hours of testimony in which people describe , over and over, the devastation that proposed cuts will have on their programs, happily refocused its lens on the alleged inappropriateness of Daly’s speech, thereby helping the Mayor get off the hook for proposing cuts to substance abuse treatment programs, in the same year he claimed to be undergoing alcohol abuse therapy.

Or maybe it was because that in this LGBT-friendly town, Newsom will always be remembered as the patron saint of gay marriage, and because of his sainthood voters will largely absolve him of all his other sins, including making decimating financial cuts to public health programs that have helped the LGBT community for decades.

Either way, this time around, Daly, (while complaining that the Beilenson hearing should happen in front of the Mayor), didn’t bother to imply that Newsom had somehow lost his moral compass.

Which was probably a wise l move, given that at that very moment the Mayor was being elevated to international renown for having pushed the gay rights envelope all the way to the wedding altar, at a time when the rest of the Democratic Party, fearing another four years of President Bush in 2004, was whimpering “too much, too soon, too fast.”

Instead, Daly commented that his district will likely look like “the Night of the Living Dead” once Newsom’s proposed budget cuts go into effect,

Daly also introduced the “Treatment on Demand Act,” which “requires that the City and County of San Francisco “maintain an adequate level of free and low cost medical substance abuse services and residential treatment slots commensurate with demand.”

Daly’s act measures demand, “by the total number of filled medical substance abuse slots plus the total number of individuals seeking such slots as well as the total number of filled residential treatment slots plus the number of individuals seeking such slots.”

But for now, it’s budget hearing season, and advocates like Bill Hirsch of the AIDS Legal Referral Panel are telling the Board how they believe the Mayor’s proposed cuts amount to “a dismantling of a system of care that has taken over 25 years to put together.”

“We’re terribly disappointed with the mayor’s Budget,” Hirsch said, against a soundtrack of whoops of joy as gay couples celebrated their weddings outside the Board’s chambers.
“Hopefully, the Board can help prevent the worst of this.”

Others, like Connie Ford of Office Employees Local 3, which represents 800 non-profit workers, called the 22 percent cuts that the Department of Public Health is facing, “the most chaotic, unstrategic and ill-advised cuts” she’d ever seen.
“We’ll hurt people and the cuts will actually cost us more money” Ford said. “There is no rhyme or reason to these cuts.”

FelicianHouston, program director of a Woman’s Place, said that the proposed cuts are a “reflection of the dismantling of the continuum of care.”
“Just don’t do it.” Houston said.

And the list of speakers went on and on, including representatives for suicide prevention, crystal meth intervention, and mobile assistance patrol programs.

“Studies show that for every one dollar spent on substance abuse treatment seven dollars are saved at the law enforcement level” said several speakers. It's a comment that brings us full circle to the insanity of proposing to start new programs, like the Community Justice Center, while proposing to slash the programs that would serve that center.

Stay tuned for move coverage of this and other budget insanities, between now and the end of July, when the annual budgetary approval cycle is scheduled to be resolved.

Should bicyclists be allowed to treat stop signs as “yields” and stop lights like stop signs? Tomorrow, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Bicycle working group will be pondering the question.

Idaho, recognizing the law of momentum is just as important as the vehicle traffic code, already adopted this practice back in 1982. And it’s working out fine, as guest writer Rachel Daigle pointed out in our special bike issue this year.

A piece in today’s Examiner highlighted naysaying from the Police Department about how this could increase accidents.

What if the exact opposite happened? What if changing the law to favor cyclists actually decreased accidents?

We all know most cyclists disregard the letter of the law because it’s really annoying to come to a full, unclipped stop at an empty intersection. Even Capt. Greg Corrales, chief of SFPD’s traffic company, was quoted in the Examiner saying, “There’s a small minority of bicyclists who actually obey the law.”

So let’s look at that. How difficult would it be – in fact, how difficult has it been – to break the will of cyclists? Clearly, ticketing cyclists doesn’t work – it’s a waste of strapped SFPD staff and resources and I’ll be the first to testify that my ticket for blowing through a stop sign only created a lot of resentment.

As it stands now, every intersection where a bike meets a car is a free for all. No driver really knows how a cyclist is going to behave because there is such a range of compliance with the law,

Instead, what if it were understood that at an intersection a cyclist was expected to roll through the sign and stop at the light, then wouldn’t that improve things?

This isn’t a call to toss safety to the wind. I’m a cautious cyclist: I function under the premise that no one can see me and I’m in constant and imminent danger of being creamed by a car. I would argue most smart cyclists also follow that creed and should continue to if California law were changed.

To that end, anyone interested in this issue should attend the meeting tomorrow at 1pm, at the MetroCenter Claremont Conference Room.

This memo [PDF], from Sean Co to the commission, outlines some of the issues really well.

San Francisco police just announced that they made an arrest in the March 20 shooting death of Marquise Washington on Turk Street in the Western Addition. They caught the 23-year-old suspect, Ronnie Louvier, in a Sacramento apartment complex yesterday with help from the capitol city's sheriff's department. He's been charged in San Francisco with murdering the 17-year-old Washington. With all the press the SFPD's gotten lately on people getting away with murder in San Francisco, thought it wouldn't hurt to give congrats on an arrest. Seventeen years old. Terrible.

It's too brilliant a day to be inside working. You feel like blowing up something up. But don't want to go postal.
So, live vicariously and watch yesterday's implosion of half of the boiler building at the former PG&E power plant in Hunters Point, brought to us courtesy of Kristine Enea. Boom!

Steven T. Jones reports from the Toward Carfree Cities conference in Portland

My head and two notebooks are filled with alarming indicators of the need for more people to go carfree and with innovative ideas for making that happen. The solutions range from facilities like the floating bicycle/pedestrian path on the eastside of the Willamette River…

…to technologies for making transit more accessible (such as online trip planners and the Nextbus system used by Muni, which San Francisco’s Michael Smith gave a presentation on yesterday) to key research (consultant Peter Jacobsen finds bikers and walkers are safer in large numbers: “There’s something going on with motorists behavior changing”) to sociopolitical movements, including the many freeway revolts around the U.S. (SF’s Jason Henderson moderated a session on that yesterday) and reclaim the streets pushes such as Critical Mass, depaving, and creative protests against expanded roadways.

Whew, that lightened my head a little bit, but there’s still just so much to say about carfree issues, which have only in recent years penetrated the mainstream consciousness. Bay Area residents Brian Smith and Jonathan Winston each maintain good blogs on the topic, and up here there’s the great BikePortland.org site and one from Canadian journalist Jude Isabella. But the standard these days is being set by the New York City Livable Streets Movement, which includes Streetsblog, Streetfilms, and the Open Planning Project.

And with stable funding from carfree-minded entrepreneur Mark Horton (who started the file-sharing service Limewire, among other things) and a desire to reach into more U.S. cities, Streetsblog is eyeing San Francisco and other California cities to expand its reach and impact.

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition director Leah Shahum, author/activist Chris Carlsson, and Streetsblog editor-in-chief Aaron Naparstek.

Visceral images, like the one posted above, helped build public awareness of and opposition to the aerial spraying of synthetic moth pheromones over urban areas like San Francisco.

The California Department of Agriculture and US Department of Agriculture just announced that they will be using sterile moths, and NOT aerially spraying pheromones, at least over URBAN areas as part of their Light Brown Apple Moth eradication program.

Spraying will proceed in non-urban areas, non-accessible by driving, such as national forests, CDFA Secretary AG Kawamura said.

Sterile releases of adult moths are expected either in late fall, or early in 2009, beginning with 500,000 adults sterile moths, and working up to 20 million a day, by 2011.

"This technology looks like it might be going to ramp up faster," CDFA Secretary AG Kawamura said, stressing that he is still very convinced that aerial pheromones are a "remarkable tool," and claiming to be, "pleased that we don't have to go with an aerial application over urban areas, because we feel progress with sterile moths will fit in with our urban eradication program."

Cindy Smith, Administrator of the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) repeated the position of USDA and CDFA concerning the Light Brown Apple Moth
"THis is a very serious pest. We are happy to have a wide variety of tools in our toolbox".

Kawamura defined urban areas as residential areas, not faming areas, and included in his urban definition Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, where the aerial spraying program was initiated last summer.

Pheromone technology will continue to be used on twist ties and plans to release parasitic wasps go forward.

"When we started in July/August 2007, we had made such progress from days of malathion, but the challenge of doing public outreach," said CDFA Secretary Kawamura, the closest he came to admitting that the reason for abruptly abandoning the aerial pheromone spraying program lies with the tremendous public uproar that ensued.

A planned environmental impact report of the LBAM eradication plan will go ahead, Kawamura confirmed.

Thousands of sterile moths will be released across California to create mating confusion and cause a population crash of the moth which continues to be classified by state and federal agencies as a worrisom invasive pest.

The pilot sterile moth program will be dictated by a trapping program that shows where the highest or expanding populations are found, Kawamura said.

As for concerns that all synthetic pheromones could pose health concerns, even on twist ties in trees, Kawamura begged, "Please listen to public health officers about safety of pheromone twist ties. "If this moth gets established, the burden of having to deal with it...we're just trying to keep the damage out, by using the best and safest environmental tools available."

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, whose office has been working with public law offices and community organizations throughout the Bay Area to monitor the CDFA's plans with respect to the program, issued a statement in response, saying "The state's aerial spray program has been a dead man walking since April, when a Santa Cruz Superior Court ruled that an environmental impact report was required to fully assess potential human health risks. So, I'm glad CDFA appears to have accepted the inevitable. At the same time, I intend to continue to work closely with other public law offices throughout the Bay Area to monitor LBAM eradication plans in the event legal action becomes necessary to protect public health and safety."

There are memos posted on the California Department of Agriculture's website, sent from CDFA to Gov. Armold Schwarzenegger, and from Arnie to AGK, (CDFA Secretary AG Kawamura) being mutually supportive about the decision to stop the spray and start the release of sterile moths, instead, memos that confirm insider rumors that Arnie privately conceded that the moth spraying program was a no-go, at the beginning of this week.

440 Jefferson St. to Exxon: "Clean me!"

Man...city attorney Dennis Herrera is on a roll these days. Gay marriage out of the way, he’s now moved on to the largest corporation in the world. Hot.

The city is suing ExxonMobil for its “defiant refusal to address environmental damage caused by decades of disposal and release of hazardous petroleum products on property owned by the Port of San Francisco in the City's Fisherman's Wharf area,” according to a press release.

Mobil Oil operated a fueling facility at 440 Jefferson St. on Fisherman’s Wharf for 54 years. Documentation of leaks and spills from the site dates back to 1986, when a 1000-gallon underground fuel tank was removed. The company formally agreed to remediate the site in 1994. The city’s suit alleges they haven’t.

“The contamination is injurious to the environment, is offensive to the senses, and obstructs the free use, development and comfortable enjoyment of the city’s property,” states the 20-page complaint. [PDF]

You tell ‘em, Dennis. That area is long overdue for some comfortable enjoyment. The complaint outlines a tedious back and forth between the city, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, and ExxonMobil, on getting that shit cleaned up – all to no avail.

“There’s a whole history of broken promises,” said city attorney spokesperson Matt Dorsey. “It’s certainly within the means of ExxonMobil Corporation to remediate the environmental damage its responsible for.”

Currently worth $501.17 billion, the oil company may soon be reaping new profits as a result of no-bid Iraqi oil contracts to be granted to it, Shell, Chevron, and others, at the end of this month. (One under emphasized result of ousting Saddam Hussein is that a state-controlled resource is now open to the free market.)

Dorsey said of the relationship with ExxonMobil, “We had an agreement in 1994. I would leave it to ExxonMobil for the rationale on why it takes 14 years to clean up a site.”

A call to ExxonMobil seeking an answer to that question hasn’t been returned.

The company doesn’t have a great track record on cleaning up their messes or paying for them: they still haven’t coughed up the $2.5 billion they owe for the Valdez spill in Alaska.

They also continue to stand by the “we’ll believe it when we see it argument” when it comes to global warming. That is – when they’re not busy funding skeptics to deliberately obfuscate the truth of the matter.

“It’s something bout a block boy that push that line, ride for the peace treaty and hustle at the same time, looking out for my brah brahs cause life’s too short, especially when the suckas telling and got homies in court.”

-JT the Bigga Figga on the Fillmore neighborhood

For this week’s cover story on the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center, the Guardian did a few things we thought might strengthen the reporting for the piece. We read hundreds of pages of law-enforcement records filed by the city attorney in last year’s gang injunction cases. We also collected extraordinary historical details about Ella Hill Hutch herself, the first black woman elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.

During the time we worked on the story, journalist Alex Kotlowitz, who’s mostly been missing in action since publishing his ground-breaking 1991 book on public housing in Chicago, There Are No Children Here, happened to write an extensive story on gang intervention efforts for the New York Times Magazine, which is well worth the read.

In the meantime, a little about Ella Hill the supervisor. In 1980, she endured a grueling reelection campaign that drove her literally to the point of exhaustion. She was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia weeks after placing a surprising fourth in a citywide race. Three months later she uncharacteristically missed a Finance Committee meeting on Feb. 25, 1981, and police eventually found her dead of heart failure at her small Scott Street apartment.

Jan Lundberg, who just resigned from San Francisco's Peak Oil Task Force, has written a great essay on the end of cheap food and what it means for the cities.

Steven T. Jones reports from the Towards Carfree Cities conference

Pedaling past a reclaimed intersection.

Culture creates the conditions to develop carfree spaces, and the bicyclist culture in Portland is rich and varied, running from the grungy Zoobombers to bike geeks like Mia Birk, all of whom were on vivid display Friday for a scorching Summer Solstice.

The Towards Carfree Cities conference wrapped up with a choice of mobile workshops around town, including the Transportation Geeks Bike Ride put on by Birk’s company, Alta Planning & Design. We pedaled down special bicycle boulevards, past bike traffic signals, colored lanes, bike boxes (which Clarence Eckerson with Streetfilms was very excited about), contra-flow lanes, and other traffic engineering feats before ending where all journeys here seem to, at a brewpub.

But for all the traffic improvements, we were still faced with many car-clogged roadways and dangerous intersections, although made a bit less so by the tendency of most Portland motorists to yield to bicyclists with a friendly wave and smile.

As the shortest night of the year began, colorful cyclists seemed to take over the streets, pedaling in small groups and huge, slow-moving packs. Four different Pedalpalooza rides all started around 9 o’clock in the hip southeast section of the city: Sexy Cyclist Karaoke 2 Karaoke, Dropout Bike Club’s monthly ride, Bowie vs. Prince Mobile Dance Party, and Solstice Ride.

The rides converged into one as they ascended volcanic Mt. Tabor just after midnight, still several hundred strong and acting as if they owned the night, which they really seemed to. But not everyone agrees with that pecking order, as we learned when a motorist threw a box of tacks into the street, flattening several bike tires.

Does Newsom show more love to managers than workers?
photos and text by Sarah Phelan

SEIU Local 1021’s Robert Haaland says the City has a pattern of hiring way more managers than front line workers over the last decade.

“Over the last ten years, the City has hired managers to front line workers at a rate of ten to one, “says Robert Haaland, SEIU Local 1021’s political coordinator. “That means 1,000 managers to 100 front line workers. And fifty percent of these new management hires have occurred within the Newsom administration.

Haaland makes his argument using an analysis of full-time equivalent positions that the City has budgeted and funded over the last ten years, broken down. by union.

SEIU requested this analysis through the office of Board President Sup. Aaron Peskin.

These figures, Haaland observes, show that SEIU gained 113 new positions over the last decade, the Municipal Executives Association gained 334 positions, and Local 21, which represents professional and technical engineers, gained 781 positions.

“We’re not going after Local 21, or any union,” Haaland says. “We’re going after the City’s hiring practices, in which their priority is to hire executives and managers.”

Haaland’s explosive claims come as the City is going through one of the most painful budget hearings in memory, in an effort to reconcile a $338 million projected deficit--a deficit that Newsom's critics claim has been predominantly balanced on the backs of the poor.

Monique Zmuda, Deputy City Controller, confirmed that there are 53.95 FTE MEA positions budgeted for 2008-09, with many occurring in the Municipal Transportation Agency and at the airport.

“The Muncipal Executives Assocation is sort of the top management level of the City,” Zmuda told the Guardian.

She noted that when the Mayor recently talked about deleting management positions, “He was not talking about the unions, he was talking about managers generically.”

“We also have managers who are attorneys, police, firefighters and physicians, and of we are looking at hiring increases over time, most are in police, nurses and sheriffs," she said.

Says Haaland, “We’re not haggling over positions, we’re haggling over an institutional priority in every City department of hiring managers over workers.”

And people wonder why the real Newsom looked stressed at his June 2 budget announcement at the Shipyard.

I realize that the fires burning around the Bay have put a lot of wood smoke in the air, but when I walked outside this morning, I was hit with what seemed like a strong chemical smell. I thought it might just be something local, but it was the same at home in Bernal Heights and outside the Guardian Building in Potrero Hill.

I know the smell of woodsmoke. This was more like dry-cleaning fluid. Am I the only one who noticed it?

Just got off the phone with SEIU 1020's RObert Haaland, who apologized for misreading the data, which we have now posted online, so all you budget wonks can go nuts and help us ordinary morals understand the City's hiring trends over the past decade.

Haaland now believes Newsom's manager to worker hiring ratio is more like 5:1, not 10:1, as previously blogged.

As Haaland told me, Controller Ben Rosenfeld just clarified that it's important to look at the gross number, not net number, which in the case of SEIU 1021, bumps up new positions to 771, and not 113 positions.

That said, Haaland still maintains there is a "a massively disproportionate number of managers, compared to workers," being hired.

"The justification being given to me is that the Municipal Executives Assocation accepted the furloughs, so they got new positions," Haaland claimed. "But at the same time they are saying that most of these "new positions' are in fact reclassifications, not new monetary positions, and tthat there are in fact only 14 or 15 actual new positions. But from our perspective, going from a manager to an executive is like being given a promotion or a raise, because it's up to Human Resources to set the salary."

Haaland further argues that if you look at the last three years worth of hiring data, and not just this year's bad budget year, then you can more clearly see a citywide trend of hiring more managers than front line workers.

Either way, this story continues to unfold, so stay tuned, and feel free to reply to this posting, with your insights into the true meanings hidden within the numbers. (And to think, they promised us that there would be no math!)

When Newsom introduced plans during his January 2008 inauguration speech to deposit $500 for every baby born in San Francisco, I was left wondering how many people who give birth in San Francisco today will manage to keep that child housed, clothed and fed in the City for the next 18 years, which is just one of the requirements for those hoping to eventually cash in on Newsom's proposed Baby Bond.

The June Sucker in the indicator species for the health of the watershed known as the June Sucker Nation, which feeds the rivers flowing into Utah Lake. So, does that mean that newborns in San Francisco are an indicator species for the health of the City and County of San Francisco? If so, we, as a City, are in trouble, with the number of children steadily decreasing once they get out of the stroller and start pushing the envelope of tiptoe-through-the-condo-and-don't make-a-noise living...

According to Newsom, the fund would earn interest - and could be accessed by every graduating high school student, who participates in public service anmd whose family remains in the city that long, with the money intended to help pay for college or first-time home ownership.

Now we learn that Newsom has budgeted $1.478 million line item for the program in a budget from which he is making 22 percent cuts to vital preexisting services , thanks to a projected $338 million deficit.

All of which has got me wondering if there is any means testing in place for this Baby Savings Bond. Because if not, isn't it likely that the only folks whose kids will likely cash in on this program will be rich people, making more than $150,000, while the rest of us suckers and our poor offspring get displaced into the East Bay and beyond.
(Adios, suckers!)

It's taken long enough, but the San Francisco Chronicle has finally figured out the biggest story in town, a story that's been the single most important part of the city's political and social landscape for more than a decade: Housing prices are ">driving the middle class out of town.

There's lots of handwringing and comments from people like Roberta Achtenberg:

"It's not very healthy for the city's social fabric or the city's economy," said Roberta Achtenberg, an economic development consultant who focuses on workforce housing.

Gee -- until recently, Achtenberg worked for the Chamber of Commerce, which has been a big part of the reason that the city drives out poor people and the middle class.

Nowhere in the story is there any mention of the reason official city policy is in large part to blame. You know why there's no affordable housing? Because we only build housing for rich people.

Brock at sfist jokes that the San Bruno fire must be "baby Jesus totally punishing us for legalizing queer marriage."

I've been thinking about this whole punishment thing. Isn't it interesting that, while sodomous, sinful San Francisco was partying over same-sex nuptials, the nice, Christian midwest was getting a flood of Biblical proportions?

Of course, it could just be human-made climate change.

But it brings back that old ditty written by poet Charles Kellogg Field after the 1906 earthquake and fire:

'If, as they say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling's whiskey?'"

Steven T. Jones covered the Towards Carfree Cities conference, which closed yesterday with the first Sunday Parkways, and brought back these photos and words.

Clear the streets of cars and they will fill with happy people riding their bikes, playing games or music, strolling with their families, communing with friends and strangers, teaching children to bike or skate, and generally building community across class, racial and regional lines.

That’s a lesson pioneered during the Sunday road closures known as Ciclovias in Bogota, Columbia and other foreign cities, events that made their U.S. debut yesterday in Portland, Oregon, drawing huge crowds and rave reviews. The city’s six-mile Sunday Parkways loop connected several North Portland parks and created a healthy, fun, communal atmosphere.

Next up are New York City, Baltimore, and San Francisco, which are all working on Ciclovias planned for later this year. SF’s version, dubbed Sunday Healthways, proposes to open up more than four miles of roadways from the Bayview Opera House to Portsmouth Square in Chinatown along the waterfront for three weekends starting in August (officials tell me more details are due for release after July 4 once current permitting discussions wrap up).

There’s bound to be a backlash among the cars-first set in San Francisco once the event is publicized and underway. But as Gil Peñalosa, who developed the concept as parks director in Bogota and now promotes it internationally, said at last week’s Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland, “The educational benefits are huge.”

Simply having a community discussion about carfree concepts – even if it means arguing about the details and scale of Ciclovias -- helps people understand the environmental and social imperatives behind reallocating urban spaces, he said. In many U.S. cities, more than half of all land goes to circulating automobiles, but as Peñalosa said, “The roads are big enough for people to do many things.”

image courtesy of www.opensecrets.org

PG&E spent almost $2 million on lobbying during the first quarter of 2008, according to an Associated Press report today. Last year they spent just under $4 million, which means they're pacing to spend double that this year.

As the industry tally for electric utilities on OpenSecrets.org shows, PG&E is third in the national field – outranked by Southern Company and the Edison Electric Institute (basically a gigantic energy lobbying group of which PG&E is also a member.)

Of course, that’s just taking care of national business. Closer to home, the $13 billion utility company has dropped $208,357.08 this year on lobbying – mostly wining and dining California Public Utilities Commissioners, influencing election outcomes, and paying the salaries of their employees who sit on public boards like the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

And just an FYI for y'all -- the spike in PG&E lobbying in 2006, as shown in the above graph, can be traced to the $11 million the corporation spent defeating a public power campaign in Yolo County. As a public power initiative for San Francisco heads to the November 2008 ballot, can we expect another banner year of spending from PG&E?

I'm always intrigued when civic-improvement types talk about the problems with city planning in San Francisco -- and harp on the fact that it takes too long to get anything done and that the same old naysayers are too powerful. The latest is a piece by David Prowler, former planning commissioner, that appeared on BeyondChron.

Among the Prowlerisms:

Forget about consensus. We're not going to get it, and too often the planners or the Board of Supervisors delay decision-making while waiting for it. But it gets farther away. We need leadership, not consensus.

TRANSLATION: Who cares what the community thinks; leave the big decisions to elected officials who the developers can effectively lobby.

Let's be frank and clear about what land-use planning can and cannot do. It doesn't by itself create buildings or good jobs. The City is trying to preserve blue-collar jobs by zoning to prevent housing (It's been characterized as "zoning for gold mines and expecting gold"). But how about linking zoning with a strategy to create these jobs?

THE PROBLEM: No, land-use planning can't always create good things, but it can sure as hell destroy things, and has done so for decades in San Francisco. Redevelopment didn't create much in the Western Addition, but it destroyed a community. No, good zoning won't create blue-collar jobs -- but bad zoning will destroy them.

Reconsider CEQA. We discuss projects and plans within the framework of the California Environmental Quality Act, best known by the acronym CEQA, which mandates addressing only how much damage can a proposal do to the environment, not how can it help the city meet goals or help the regional environment by concentrating growth where there's infrastructure. Here in San Francisco, we hold up even small-scale projects, such as the 17 residences and retail uses proposed at the empty lot at 19th and Valencia streets by the longtime residents and owners of a popular Mexican restaurant. Really, in a built-up city, along a transit street where just about every other spot is housing over stores, how much environmental damage could a project like this do?

TRANSLATION: Get those pesky project foes out of the way and take away any tool they have to preserve their neighbhorhoods.

This kind of stuff infuriates me. The problem with city planning is very simple, and I can phrase it in one sentence: Planning in San Francisco is driven almost entirely by private developers and exists to serve their interests and needs.

And of course, although it doesn't say so in his piece, David Prowler is a developer.

Lots of talk and some interesting action at the Harvey Milk LGBT Club meeting last night. Marc Salomon, Robert Haaland and I gave a presentation on the meaning of the June election, and what November’s going to be about, and I passed along my thoughts about the tremendous potential for a broad progressive coalition this fall.

But mostly, the discussion involved the Democratic County Central Committee.

See, in June, thanks to a well-organized slate effort, the progressives won enough seats to hold something close to a working majority on the DCCC. That matters – and this fall, it could matter a lot. Because the DCCC controls the endorsements and money for the local Democratic Party. And in some of the key local races, particularly the swing supervisorial districts, the party’s money and party support could make the difference.

And the first test for the progressive slate will be the vote in a few weeks for DCCC chair.

Could Treasure Island go carfree? That was the intriguing question that Gus Yates, president of the Berkeley-based nonprofit Carfree City USA, posed during a thought-provoking presentation he gave last week at the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland.

The question goes to the heart of whether U.S. cities are prepared to take more than baby steps toward reducing automobile dependence. Treasure Island, which is being redesigned almost from scratch, is close to the urban core and faces significant challenges to accommodating thousands of new motorists. If not there, where?

The question wasn’t simply an abstract exercise, but a serious proposal that Yates formally presented last year to Kheay Loke, senior project manager with Wilson Meany Sullivan, the lead developer for Treasure Island, which is proposed to include about 6,000 new housing units.

The compelling arguments that Yates makes – and the reasons that Loke offered for turning Yates down – shows how, in the minds of current decision-makers, capitalist imperatives still trump the need to seriously wrestle with global warming, traffic congestion, declining public health, and other byproducts of automobile reliance.

Bay Guardian City Editor Steven T. Jones covered Towards Carfree Cities, an international conference held last week in Portland (the first time it was in the U.S.), and wrote the following reports.

Video of Portland's first Ciclovia-style street closure, Sunday Parkways, from www.streetfilms.org

What is carfree? -- A look at the concept behind the conference

"We're not doing enough" -- A clarion call for U.S. cities to join an international movement

Everybody into the streets! -- Portland created a carfree Ciclovia, just like San Francisco plans to do in August

From geeks to freaks, a look at Portland bicycle culture -- The movement in motion

Depaving Day -- Transforming urban spaces from asphalt to soil

San Franciscans in the house -- Local thinkers played a big role at the conference

Treasure Island as case study -- Could we build a model carfree project just off the San Francisco shoreline?

Spreading the word -- Streetsblog and other media innovators make the carfree case

Aboard a Portland-bound train -- Riding the rails with the San Francisco contingent

Curious deal creates alternative weekly monopoly

By Tim Redmond
I’m a little late on this, but it’s taken me a while to figure out the back story.

The parent company of the SF Weekly, which a few months ago sold off the East Bay Express, is shedding another money-losing paper -- in the process, ending alternative weekly competition in Cleveland.

Village Voice Media will sell the Cleveland Scene to Times Shamrock, a chain that owns five other alternative weeklies. Times Shamrock is also buying the Cleveland Free Times, and will merge the two papers under the Scene name.

“It’s a sad day,” David Eden, former Free Times editor, told me. “This is a strong voice that being silenced.”
It’s also a curious new chapter in a six-year-old saga involving the nation’s largest alternative weekly chain, the U.S. Department of Justice and a scheme to wipe out competition in two markets.

The Scene was losing gobs of money, more than $1 million last year alone, according to documents filed in court as part of the Guardian's lawsuit against VVM. The Free Times, owned by The Times-News of Erie Pennsylvania, was also struggling, publisher Matt Fabyan told me, "although we were much closer to stable."

Still, there’s been talk of shutting the Free Times for months now: Back in December, 2007, Justice Department lawyers contacted Eden and asked him if he thought the Cleveland market was big enough for two competing alternative papers. “I told them it was,” Eden said.

Among the proposals on the table: VVM was interested in buying the paper and merging it with the Scene. But federal regulators wouldn’t allow it.

The reason: Back in 2003, the Justice Department and the attorneys general of California and Ohio filed suit against New Times, then the owner of the Scene, and VVM, which owned the Free Times. The two chains, which have since merged, had entered into a shady – and, it turns out, illegal – arrangement to create alt-weekly monopolies in Cleveland and Los Angeles. VVM agreed to shut its paper in Cleveland, and in exchange, New Times shut a paper in Los Angeles that was competing with the VVM-owned LA Weekly.

Justice forced the chains to sell the Free Times to a group of investors who vowed to keep it open and continue competition. The consent decree the chains signed bared them from taking any further anticompetitive actions in Cleveland or L.A.

But although VVM couldn’t create a monopoly, another newspaper outfit apparently can.

Fabyan said he had been in contact with the Times Shamrock people for some time, and that "I told them you really want to buy both papers. I don't think this is a market big enough for two alternative weeklies."

Eden was willing to try to save the Free Times: He said that he’d raised enough money to make a “substantial offer” for the paper: “I’m told that VVM had offered $450,000 for the Free Times,” he said. “We were close to that figure.” But his bid was turned down.

Don Farley, who runs the alt-weekly group at Times Shamrock, said he couldn't comment on the details of the negotiations except to say that "we've been back and forth looking at the Free Times, and Scene became available as well."

That was clearly part of the appeal: Running a paper that has no competition is typically more lucrative. “We can serve the community better this way,” said Fayan, who will be publisher of the Scene.

Andy Van De Voorde, executive associate editor at VVM, told me that his company didn't see this as a three-way deal. "We sold our paper to Times Shamrock, and that's our only role," he said.

But he also confirmed that VVM had wanted to buy the Free Times and merge the two papers, but had run afoul of the Justice Department. “I’ll leave it to you to speculate on why we couldn’t do this deal, but Times Shamrock could,” he said.

Well, for one thing, Times Shamrock isn’t a previous offender, under a consent decree to stop trying to monopolize markets. But I’m also curious why Justice is allowing this to happen.

I’ve been trying to get a comment out of the Justice Department since Friday. The PR people keep telling me they’ll get back to me. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.

The Board of Supervisors Rules Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow (Friday) to discuss the new clean-energy charter amendment. It’s a long-overdue measure that would give San Francisco control of its own energy future and set aggressive mandates for sifting to renewable resources for electricity.

The measure is sponsored by Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin, and includes the following:

1. A mandate that 51% of the city’s electricity is generated from renewable resources by 2017, 75% by 2030, and 100% by 2040. This would be one of the few laws in the country that requires a city to move toward a 100 percent renewable portfolio. It also requires the Public Utilities Commission to issue a report every two years explaining how the city is meeting those goals. This would be a model for cities around the nation (and around the world), and would put San Francisco in the forefront of the movement to reduce carbon emissions and slow climate change. Since state and federal governments are moving far too slowly on the most important environmental issue of our lives, cities are going to have to take the lead, and San Francisco – one of the most progressive communities in the nation -- should be showing everyone else how to do to that.

2. A mandate that the city move toward acquiring its distribution system for the sale of electricity. Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which now supplies the residential and business customers in San Francisco, is spending a huge amount of money on a greenwashing campaign to convince residents that it’s moving away from fossil fuels. That’s a big lie: PG&E's current power profile is 44 percent fossil fuels, 24 percent nuclear, 20 percent large hydro, and only 12 percent renewable – and the utility admits that it will not even make the state’s mandate of 20 percent renewable by 2010. . The only way this city is going to have a truly environmentally sound energy program is if we run it ourselves.

Of course, a publicly run utility has other big advantages. Public-power agencies all over the country have lower electric rates and many bring in huge amounts of revenue, which the city desperately needs. And public-power is good for the economy

3. Mandate green jobs and job training for San Franciscans. There’s a lot of money in renewable energy, and thousands and thousands of good jobs. The measure mandates that the PUC as part of creating a public power agency create job-training programs to help San Franciscans build careers in green energy.

The hearing is at 10 am. Be there and support this crucial legislation.

Are we worried, yet? With San Francisco having climbed deeper into bed with Lennar thanks to Prop. G's passage, the bad news coming from Wall Street and beyond can't exactly be music to Mayor Gavin Newsom's ears.

As Lennar reported bigger-than-expected quarterly losses today, Lennar's Chief Executive Officer Stuart Miller expressed hope that the federal government would soon belly up and help bail out the beleagured housing industry.

Miller cited increased foreclosures, higher unemployment rates and diminished consumer confidence as reasons why the Florida-based mega developer experienced a 61 percent loss in revenues this quarter.

“With the U.S. housing inventory growing in excess of absorption and limited credit available, the prospect of further deterioration in the homebuilding industry will likely become reality absent Federal government action,” said Miller, who is apparently hedging his political bets by making the maximum campaign contribution to both presidential candidates.

“To that end, we are hopeful that the Federal government will acknowledge the need for further reform and will institute programs designed to stabilize and facilitate the recovery of the housing market.”

But a government plan to address the nationwide foreclosure crisis hit a roadblock in the Senate yesterday in the shape of a Republican from Nevada, Sen. John Ensign.

Sen. John Ensign (Nevada) wants $7 billion for renewable energy tax credits before he'll support foreclosure bill.

This isn’t the first time that Ensign has played the role of lone obstructionist.

In September 2007, the Senate discovered that Ensign was using the “secret hold” to obstruct a bill that requires senators to file fund-raising reports electronically, rather than bury the identity of their benefactors in paper filings.

And for a short period in March 2006, Ensign blocked the nomination of Vice Admiral Thad Allen (who replaced FEMA director Mike Brown in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) to become the next Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.

But now Ensign, who reportedly has been tasked with assembling a staff to win back the U.S. Senate for Republicans in November 2008, is blocking a foreclosure rescue plan that has broad bipartisan support until he gets a vote on his amendment to provide almost $7 billion in renewable energy tax credits.

As a result, passage of the housing bill to create a multi-billion fund to aid thousands of homeowners refinance costly mortgages into more affordable government-backed loans, will likely be delayed until after July 4.

“In an election year, very few things are actually going to make it into law,'' Ensign told reporters, ``So if you actually want to get something done, you need to be on that train that is basically going to be leaving the station.”

While Lennar spent $5 million to defeat a grassroots coalition that wanted 50 percent affordable housing in the Bayview, the City applied for $25 million in grants to bail out Lennar's Shipyard development.

Here in San Francisco, Lennar Corp. has assured elected officials that there is no relationship between LandSource, a land and development company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday, June 8, and Lennar’s Bayview Hunter’s Point project.

In a June 9 letter to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Lennar Corporation’s Chief Investment Officer Emile Haddad wrote, “We anticipate that there may be some effort to link LandSource to other Lennar ventures, including Hunters Point Shipyard. Let me be clear: There is no relationship between the two entities. Hunters Point has its own capital structure and financial partners.”

Haddad does not however explicitly mention that LandSource, which owns properties in California, Arizona, Florida, Texas and New Jersey, does have a relationship with Lennar Mare Island, which also filed bankruptcy June 8, leaving city officials in the already bankrupt Vallejo doubly stressed.

And nowhere does Haddad guarantee San Francisco a smooth, obstacle-free redevelopment of Bayview Hunters Point, which apparently is already facing a potentially fatal $25 million funding gap, according to City officials.

“Lennar is committed to continuing to work closely with our community partners and the City and County of San Francisco to overcome any obstacles and to work toward a successful venture,” Haddad writes. “You have my personal reassurance that we will keep you fully informed of any and all significant developments that may impact the project.”

“Likewise, we will continue to utilize the development’s partnership experience and qualifications to leverage all state and federal funding sources to enhance the project and ensure its timely completion.”

As for Lennar’s CEO Stuart Miller, he told investors that “notwithstanding the bleak operating environment, Lennar made significant progress during our second quarter.”

This progress included reducing unsold completed inventory. “We now have on average less than one completed unsold home per community.”
Lennar also reduced selling, general and administrative expenses by 60 percent.

“Given our success with asset reduction, we have shifted our primary focus to the execution of an efficient homebuilding model through the repositioning of our product to meet today’s consumer demand and by aggressively reducing our construction costs.”

Sounds like a potential Triple Uh-oh.

‘we are very pleased to end our second quarter with approx $880 million in cash and no outstanding borrowings under our credit facility. We have reduced our maximum joint venture recourse debt by approximately $1 billion from its peak level in 2006, which reflects a decrease of over 50 percent.”

“We recognize that the remainder of 2008 will likely see further deterioration in overall market conditions; however, we are confident that we will remain well positioned with a strong balance sheet and properly scaled operations to navigate the current market downturn as a leaner and more efficient homebuilder.”

Meanwhile, following a posting of a video showing some community members less than positive take on Lennar, someone replied with a video about Lennar's homebuilding operations in Texas.

Seems like some folks in the Bayview aren't the only ones, er, frustrated with Lennar.

The SF Chamber of Commerce is getting itself all into a frothy lather over the prospect of a public-power campaign, and the email that the Chamber sent out today is full of insanely inaccurate iinformation.

Here's the email and a few notes on its most bizarre claims:

This Friday, June 27 at 10:00am at City Hall, Room 263 the Rules Committee will consider a measure that would put the City in control of our power system. The cost of this measure will be billions of dollars, paid for with higher utility bills, especially for business.

The cost to buy the PG&E electric system in San Francisco in 2010 is presently expected to beat least $4.02 billion. This is only a preliminary estimate, the final figure could be substantially higher. When you include the interest payments on the bonds and the associated severance and financing costs, the ultimate cost for a takeover will be more than twice that amount.

WHAT? Where do you suppose that $4.02 billion came from? It clearly didn't come from any realistic study. PG&E's dilapidated, poorly maintained distribution system is probably worth less than $500 million -- and even if the city had to pay twice that much, it would be more than worthwhile when you look at how much revenue would come in.

San Franciscans Will Pay to Replace the Lost Tax Revenue

Taking over PG&E means removing PG&E from the tax rolls. That will cost taxpayers over $25 million annually in lost franchise fees, payroll taxes, property taxes, and direct contributions from PG&E. Those taxes and payments will need to be replaced – or services will need to be cut. The City is now facing one of the most severe budget shortfalls ever. The power system takeover will make this budget gap at least $25 million worse. Again, there is no current plan to replace this lost revenue. The PG&E takeover means either service cuts and layoffs – or another massive tax increase.

HUH? The $25 million the city would lose would be more than replaced by the money -- several hundred million at least -- that the city would gain in extra revenue from running a municipal utility.

We'll All Pay the Price of Putting City Hall in Charge of our Power System

Right now, PG&E is regulated by the State of California. But a city-run power system would be exempt from most state regulations, giving the Board of Supervisors the power to make some customers pay more so others can pay less, siphon away funds needed for the retrofit of the Hetch Hetchy water system and delay investments in the safety and reliability of our energy grid.

WELL, actually the supervisors could mandate renewable energy -- which PG&E isn't doing.

So the battle is already underway, and already, PG&E's mouthpieces are putting out wildly misleading data.

Should be a great hearing tomorrow.

Anthrax: the bacteria that wormed its way into the consciousness of an entire nation, thanks to who?

I like to cruise the news on Fridays in search of breaking stories that someone hopes will be buried by the weekend and forgotten by Monday.

I bet the feds are hoping that Steven Hatfill will be one such case.

That's because they have just agreed to pay the former bioweapons researcher $2.825 million and a $150,000 annuity.

Hatfill, who lost his job, but was never charged, sued the Justice Department in 2003 for violating his privacy , after he was designated a "person of interest" following the deadly anthrax attacks in October 2001.

Five people were killed, 17 became seriously ill--and an entire nation was traumatized, on top of the already traumatizing 9/11 attacks.

Two post office workers died in Washington. An employee of American Media died in Florida; an elderly woman died in Oxford, Connecticut, as did a hospital worker in New York.

At least 24 FBI agents undertook 900 interviews, but no one was ever charged.

It sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but at the news organization where I was working at the time, we were instructed to open the mail wearing gloves and mask, after anthrax-laced letters were sent to the offices of U.S. Sens. Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Veahy of Vermont and a TV news network.

I also remember local law enforcement turning out in full force, after white powder was found on the street outside my office. It turned out to be flour, scattered in a beer run, in which someone had gone jogging, marking the path from bar to bar with flour.

Asked if the perpetrators could be prosecuted, a local fireman told me , "Well, you could stretch it out to littering."

Wish that we could prosecute whoever was responsible for littering an entire nation's psyche with fear of anthrax.

But with the feds declaring the case "stone cold," feel free to share your "anthrax memories" here, lest we forget how thoroughly terrorized we all were--and lest we ignore, at our own peril, how some will seek to reactivate those fears as the November election approaches.

At today’s Rules Committee, Supervisors Bevan Dufty, Tom Ammiano, and Chris Daly, all expressed enthusiasm for San Francisco’s Clean Energy Act. Daly and Ammiano even broke into chants of “victory, victory” during discussion of approving the measure for November’s ballot.

"In 2002 I supported Prop D and I look forward to supporting this measure," said Dufty during his comments on this new public power ballot initiative. "I think PG&E has not held the public trust in San Francisco well," he added, citing the smear campaign PG&E launched against Mark Leno during his bid for State Senate.

The measure, known as the “San Francisco Clean Energy Act,” would amend the city charter to require that, within 120 days of passing the legislation, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission must “produce a comprehensive plan for providing clean, secure, cost effective electricity for city departments and residents and businesses.” This may include construction city-owned transmission lines, as well as procuring the resources to advance the Community Choice Aggregation plan of 51 percent renewables by 2017.

It actually goes one step farther and says if CCA falls through, the city must still get 51 percent of their energy from renewable and clean sources, 75 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2040. A green jobs workforce development must also be part of the plan, and if it’s determined that public ownership of the grid and resources is the way to go, any employees fired by PG&E, the private company that provides our power now, will be hired by the PUC.

Sup. Ross MIrkarimi, who introduced the measure, rattled off figures from Alameda, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, and Sacramento, all of whom have publicly-owned utilities and all of whom charge the average household rates far below PG&E.

His figures, for a 500 kilowatt hour household:

Obama rocked people's socks off in Oakland, 2007. He's been doing it ever since, and today he did it, again.
Photo by Khalil Abusaba

Ever since I saw Sen. Barack Obama speaking in Oakland on St. Patrick's Day, 2007, I've been confident that he'll be able to roll with the punches on the presidential campaign trail, no matter what gets thrown at him.

Today, Obama did it again, turning the predictable attacks on his patriotism into an opportunity to make a great and uplifting speech.

"Patriotism starts as a gut instinct, a loyalty and love for country that's rooted in some of my earliest memories," Obama said in a speech that's being widely reported on the Internet.

Obama said that as he grew up, his patriotism matured to something that "Would survive my growing awareness of our nation's imperfections: its ongoing racial strife; the perversion of our political system that were laid bare during the Watergate hearings; the wrenching poverty of the Mississippi Delta and the hills of Appalachia."

Obama said he learned that "What makes America great has never been its perfection, but the belief that it can be made better."

Patriotism, he also said, must involve the willingness to sacrifice.

He then called attention to the service of John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate.

McCain's campaign has been calling on Obama to condemn comments from retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who said this weekend that McCain's service in Vietnam did not necessarily mean that he was qualified to serve as commander-in-chief.

Clark is a military adviser for Obama.

Obama did not directly address Clark's comments, today, but after calling attention to McCain's service, he said "no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters of both sides."

Denver-based MediaNews Group announced today that it plans to lay off all pens, note pads and toilet paper declaring that the cuts would enable the company to remain profitable while continuing to serve news to its readers.

The company, which owns several major daily newspapers in the Bay Area including the Oakland Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times, also disclosed that its reporters will no longer gather in buildings leased or owned by MediaNews as the company will be shedding all of its commercial office space in order to save yet more money. Instead, they'll meet in freely accessible public parks where they will use scattered twigs to etch their stories into the dirt relying on cans and rope to call their sources. Bloggers will then summarize the etchings by peering over their shoulders, but attribution won't be necessary, because, well, you can't link readers to sodden earth.

MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton asked company employees during a press conference in a Denver city park to refrain from throwing beer cans at him so the company can recycle them for pocket change to pay down his vast army of creditors, which is currently threatening mutiny.

Singleton has also reportedly done away with "beats" at his newspapers and his few remaining reporters will from now on cover "whatever they can gather with crude tools available on the ground," according to the only reporter capable of actually documenting the conference with a pen and note pad, a bored-looking Entertainment Tonight producer who was apparently passing time in the park before Val Kilmer made a rare, rumored appearance in an opulent Denver restaurant around the corner.

"These are strange times," Singleton said at the conference. "It may appear on the surface that the American people care about the Zimbabwean elections considering the recent demand for coverage there. But my nose for news tells me its anti-union editorials on the front page of the Denver Post that they really want and need."