Explosive news from Orlando: unexploded bombs found on Lennar housing site

How did Lennar build homes on a former military base without the live ordnance first being cleared? That's the subject of a CNN report about a neighborhood in Orlando that was built on the former Pinecastle Jeep Range.

And as questions swirl about who knew what and when, a bigger question is coming into focus: who will the homeowners be able to hold accountable, now that their homes have been built? Is it the Army Corps of Engineers, the developer?

The report notes that "multiple lawsuits have been filed, accusing builders of gross negligence and seeking unspecified monetary damage."

NIMBY nightmare: top ten things you don't want to find in your backyard.

So, is this "real estate fraud" as one commentator on the CNN online edition claims?

And is it true that the government would have to step in and help the banks if all these property owners refused to pay their mortgages, claiming that the contract to buy the property was fraudulent, due to non-disclosure?

Either way, here is an interesting comment that should give prospective home owners pause:
" The twisted thing about real estate is you owe the bank not the developer. The bank pays the developer, and the home-owner is left with 30 years of house payments on a piece of property not safe to live on and lower in value than they paid for it. "

Photo from Rocky Mountain News
This is the kind of thing I feared when I criticized Matt Gonzalez for joining Ralph Nader's latest run for president. I cringed when listening to Nader tell the Rocky Mountain News that Obama "talks white" and doesn't express enough concern for life in "the ghettos," using anachronistic and extremely paternalistic language to essentially hector Obama for not being black enough.
Progressives have a hard enough time convincing communities of color that we're on their side without arrogant old white guys talking down to them and the nation's first black presidential candidate. Nader says he sees no difference between Obama and the other Democrats he's challenged and says Obama's campaign is an appeal to "white guilt."
The best part of the interview is when Nader levels this criticism at Obama: "He censors himself." Guess what, Ralph? In civil society, we all censor ourselves from time to time, something that is particularly important for a presidential candidate. It's advice this campaign would do well to adopt before Nader's antiquated, quasi-racist rhetoric takes that desperate campaign down even further into infamy.

The Chronicle’s big front-page two-days-in-a-row expose on a handful of undocumented kids escaping from a group home has the mayor scrambling, the city attorney scrambling, the DA scrambling and the national media in a crazy-San-Francisco twitter.

In the end, the pressure’s going to be on to sidestep or undermine San Francisco’s sanctuary-city law, which forbids local authorities from cooperating with the feds in immigration cases.

There’s a good reason for that law: If undocumented immigrants fear the local government will turn them in to be deported, they won’t report crimes, won’t report extortion from employers, won’t seek medical care, etc. It’s also, frankly, a statement that San Francisco doesn’t support and won’t support the horrible anti-immigrant policies of the Bush Administration.

As usual when the Chron gets onto one of these crime stories, the whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. Here’s a little perspective::

When juveniles are arrested in San Francisco, they go into the juvenile justice system, and are placed in the Youth Guidance Center, better known as Juvenile Hall. When the kids in custody are here illegally, and have no parents or legal guardians in town, it’s a bit of a challenge; the sanctuary law (and common sense) say the young people shouldn’t be turned over to the feds, particularly given the horror stories these days about what happens to immigrants in custody.

The Washington Post has done a major report on this, and the tales from behind the concertina wire are horrifying.

No decent judge or prosecutor in San Francisco would want to send nonviolent offenders into that system, particularly minors.

And since they offenders aren’t citizens, they can’t be sent into traditional youth rehab centers.

So for a while, the city just put them on airplanes and sent them home to their families. That wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was better than most of the available options. The feds found out about it and cried foul.

So the city started sending nonviolent minors who lacked documentation to private rehab centers. Not perfect either, but no solution is perfect in this fucked up system. Not surprisingly, eight Hondurans, who were convicted of dealing crack, escaped recently – and that’s what really sent the Chron over the edge.

But remember: These were nonviolent offenders. Many, according to the Public Defender’s Office, are victims themselves, driven (or forced) into the drug trade. They haven’t killed anyone, or robbed anyone.

Of course, the whole thing now has Mayor Newsom ducking, the city attorney saying it wasn’t his fault, the courts pointing at the city – and ICE and the US attorney, along with the likes of Fox News, using this as an opportunity to attack the city’s sanctuary ordinance.

I send Jaxon Van Derbecken, the Chron’s chief reporter on this series, an email this morning asking what he thinks the city ought to do instead – turn the kids over to the feds? He hasn’t answered me yet. I’ll let you know when he does.

Happy Independence! This is one of those creepy techie developments that I wish our incredible Techsploitation columnist Annalee Newitz would sink her privacy-defending cyberteeth into, but alas, her column has ended this week.

Basically, as Machinist's Farhad Manjoo reports (via Wired), in an ongoing copyright infringement case brought by Viacom against YouTube, a judge just yesterday ordered YouTube parent company Google to hand over "12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) [to Viacom] that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer's computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you've never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper's Web site, you're in the database."

Comedy Central knows you've watched Busty Heart crush a six-pack with her boobs!

Google Search Privacy: Plain and Simple

Viacom, idiotically, still wants to bust YouTube for transmitting copyrighted clips posted by users. "Idiotically," I say, because if stoner/slackers didn't put down their combo bong-remotes long enough to post "John Stewart" snippets to YouTube, I'd have absolutely no idea who the heck he was, except someone badly in need of a hairdresser.

I love Web 2.0! We're all victims of our own pleasure. Next: US Government busts scruffy earnest dudes from Florida who trash Madonna melodically.

The Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBT lobbying group, is holding its gala dinner in San Francisco July 26th, and the event is creating a political furor.

See, the HRC agreed to a deal last year that cut transgender workers out of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The HRC has been under fire ever since. Local queer activists, furious at the HRC sellout, are boycotting the dinner. And a long list of communithy leaders, including Carole Migden and Mark Leno, Tom Ammiano, Bevan Dufty and Mark Sanchez have signed on and announced they won't attend.

Dennis Herrera, who was supposed to receive an award at the dinner for his work on same-sex marriage, just announced he won't go. Good for him.

So who, exactly, WILL be attending this $350-a-plate dinner?

Well, I'm told Rep. Nancy Pelosi has been invited. She was, of course, part of the deal in the House that threw the trans people under the bus, but I don't think she wants to be the only San Francisco elected official to defy the boycott. Then there's Mayor Gavin Newsom; the HRC would love to celebrate same-sex marriage this year, since it diverts attention from the ENDA controversy, but will Newsom piss off a nearly unanimous queer community and attend?

Frankly, Pelosi and Newsom would be fools to go. If the HRC had any sense, the group would cancel the event; the group has lost so much credibility in San Francisco that the dinner's going to be an embarassment.

Lawyers for the SF Weekly and its parent company tried July 8 to overturn the Bay Guardian’s $16 million predatory pricing verdict, rehashing several old arguments and trotting out a few new ones.

Judge Marla Miller took the case under submission and is expected to rule within ten days.

The Weekly and Village Voice Media asked the judge to throw out the jury verdict or order a new trial. The gist of their arguments: The evidence presented in court didn’t support the decision that a San Francisco jury reached after a five-week trial.

The arguments were at times highly technical, and hinged on the finer points of the definitions of words. In the same way the Bill Clinton once asked what the meaning of “is” is, James Wagstaffe, one of the VVM lawyers, tried to insist that the judge and jury had misinterpreted the term “agent” – and thus improperly concluded that the Phoenix-based chain was equally responsible for paying the damages.

The argument was aimed at severing VVM – a company with $190 million in sales and $11 million in profits – from the verdict. That way the only guilty party would be the Weekly – which VVM admits has no assets and would be unable to pay the Guardian anywhere near $16 million.

Evidence presented at the trial had shown that VVM executives were well aware of, and directly involved in, the SF Weekly’s long pattern of selling ads below cost in an effort to harm a locally owned competitor. In fact, two senior officers, CFO Jed Brunst and group publisher Scott Tobias, admitted on the stand that the SF Weekly would have gone out of business years ago if the chain hadn’t made a policy of shipping large sums of money from headquarters into the San Francisco operation to subsidize below-cost sales.

And yet, Wagstaffe claimed, the law required that VVM be acting as an “agent” for SF Weekly in order to be equally liable. “You have to act on behalf of someone else to be an agent,” he argued. “It is not enough to aid or assist.”
Since VVM was the parent company, Wagstaffe told Miller, nobody at that entity was taking orders from the local subsidiary. So VVM and its officers couldn’t have been SF Weekly’s “agents.”

He also said that Miller had screwed up and given the jury the wrong instructions about the presumption of intent. He said the instructions improperly allowed the jury to assume that VVM and the Weekly intended to harm the Guardian.

At the time those instructions were hammered out, later in the trial, “it was nine o’clock at night and we were all running around,” he told her with typical animation. “I was there with my usual energy but everyone else was tired.”
Guardian lawyer, Ralph Alldredge calmly asked Miller to look directly at the statute involved in the case. “The language is remarkable in its breadth,” he said, explaining that the state Legislature had clearly written the Unfair Practices Act to prevent big companies from hiding their assets by blaming subsidiaries for illegal acts. The law, he said, “refers to aiding and assisting, directly or indirectly, and says that the people who do that are equally responsible.”

He added: “What more aid and assistance could you possibly provide in a predatory pricing case than to fund it?”
As for the jury instructions, Alldredge pointed out that the issue of presumption is hardly new. “That court has already looked long and hard at this,” he said. “There were long discussions about jury instructions.”
Alldredge agued that the state law applied directly to the facts at trial, and that the jury properly applied that law. “This is exactly the sort of scenario that the law was written to cover,” he said. “A big company with operations in many markets was going after a smaller entity in one market.

“That statute,” he concluded, “was set up to presume that if you can prove below-cost sales and damages, intent shouldn’t be the sticking point.”

H. Sinclair Kerr, Wagstaffe’s partner and the lead Weekly lawyer during the trial, then rehashed the VVM argument from the trial that the Guardian profits over the seven year period of the complaint were not sufficient to justify the $6.3 million in damages that the jury awarded. (Miller later ruled that much of the damages should be trebled).
Alldredge countered that the Guardian financial expert, Clifford Kupperberg, had calculated the profit the Guardian could have made during that period without the Weekly’s below-cost pricing and the losses the Guardian experienced. The combination of the two would be around a million dollars a year, he said.

Although Kerr claimed the damages were “excessive,” Alldredge argued the Guardian had to shrink its business to survive the predatory onslaught and would have to make major investments to build the paper back up. "The Guardian must get back the profits and invest to rebuild the business," he said. There was "nothing excessive about what the jury found," he said.

At one point, as Kerr tried to bring back the VVM argument about the extent of the competition for the two alternatives Judge Miller interrupted and said, “Do you mean the poetry journal and the paper in Livermore?”

She was referring to the VVM argument during trial in which it cited a huge list of papers, from the Gilroy Dispatch to the Bodega Bay Navigator to a paper in Livermore, as competition. Alldredge made fun of the reference during trial. Miller's remark stopped Kerr from continuing this line of reasoning.

The hearing lasted four and a half hours, and Miller allowed both sides considerable latitude in speaking and addressing the arguments. Both of the top executives of VVM, Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, were on hand, as was Brunst and Andy Van De Voorde, who has been covering the trial for VVM.

Van De Voorde, whose reports have been long on rhetoric and personal attacks, posted an atypically short and non-bombastic story on the hearing.

The Guardian is represented by Alldredge, Hill and E. Craig Moody. The Weekly has brought Forrest Hainline onto its legal team after the trial, but he is no longer involved, so the case is in the hands of Kerr and Wagstaffe.

Click here to see the Guardian arguments as laid out in our opposition brief.

The California High Speed Rail Authority, during a meeting this morning in San Francisco, voted unanimously to set the Bay Area route through the Pacheco Pass and up the peninsula into the Transbay Terminal and to approve the related environmental documents. The action ends a three-year controversy over whether to bring the proposed high-speed rail line over Pacheco Pass, a cheaper and easier option favored by most Bay Area politicians and government agencies, or over the Altamont Pass, an option favored by groups such as the Planning and Conservation League and California Rail Foundation, which are threatening a lawsuit over today's decision. The CHSRA board also voted unanimously today to pursue creation of a separate, regional rail line over Altamont that would connect into the high speed rail system.
Meanwhile, there are battles in Sacramento over Assembly Bill 3034, which would update the language and financial oversight provisions of Proposition 1, the $10 billion high speed rail bond measure on the November ballot, replacing current language that was written six years ago when the measure was first approved for the ballot before it was repeatedly pushed back by the Legislature. That bill, which needs a two-thirds vote of both legislative houses, is being heard tomorrow by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Once built, the high speed trains would travel at up to 220 mph and make the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles Union Station in about two and a half hours, mostly likely running entirely on renewable energy sources without the huge greenhouse gas output from either driving or flying. For a lengthy discussion of the project, its complicated politics, today's vote, and the dramas surrounding AB 3034 and Senator Leland Yee, read next week's Guardian.

In another sign that Mayor Gavin Newsom is increasingly looking past San Francisco's needs into his own political future as a candidate for governor, he has announced the resignation of chief of staff Phil Ginsburg, a competent manager and bureaucrat who appears to have been forced out for not having sharp enough political teeth. Replacing Ginsburg is Newsom's longtime homeless policy point person, Trent Rhorer, a young political animal whose fierce loyalty to Newsom has often been at odds with his obligations as a public servant. As head of the Human Services Agency, Rhorer recently helped gut services to humans in favor of big executive salaries for partisans like himself. In covering eight California counties over my newspaper career, I've never encountered a more politicized and less diplomatic department head than Rhorer, who seems acutely aware that Newsom is his meal ticket. "He's a Newsom sycophant," Sup. Chris Daly said.
Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin also makes another salient point about Rhorer: "This will be the first time in the history of San Francisco that we'll have a chief of staff who lives in Oakland." In fact, Rhorer has often joined the chorus of other outsiders like the Chronicle's CW Nevius in sounding the suburban perspective on the realities of urban life, an approach we'll likely see more and more of out of Newsom, whose recent flip-flop on cooperating with the feds is just the beginning of the jilting of San Franciscans in favor of more conservative Californians.
I asked Newsom's press office (which has also become more partisan in the last year or so) about all of the above via e-mail, and press secretary Nathan Ballard responded simply, "Smart remarks like that one cost Peskin his seat on the selection committee."

Musical support alone might be enough to swing undecided voters in the November presidential race.
On the one hand, you could vote for a guy who has "It's Rainin' McCain, Hallelujah!" kinda musical backup:

I'm sorry, but whatever way you look at it that video sucks. Unless you are an Obama supporter, which makes me wonder just who made this fiasco.

Or you could vote for a guy who has a whole string of musical support. The latest I've seen is Coco Tea's reggae Obama, which is a nice mellow tune for a Friday.

but my alltime favorite remains Barack O'Bollywood:

It's described as "east meets west meets acid". Enjoy--and enjoy your weekend!

When I first heard about current plans to build a "Victory Garden" in Civic Center Plaza -- which will be officially planted tomorrow at 10 a.m. in a ceremony featuring Mayor Gavin Newsom and Alice Waters, the pioneering restaurateur who founded Slow Food Nation -- I thought it was a really cool idea. Here was the city of San Francisco giving some of its most prime and high profile real estate over to the urban gardening movement, which seeks alternatives to the fossil fuel dependent industrialized food system.
And the Victory Garden concept is great, conjuring up the collective commitment to our national interests that inspired patriotic citzens to plant gardens during the two world wars. Sure, the logistics of tending and securing the garden might be tough, but Newsom seemed to be making a commitment to put city resources behind this important symbolic statement.
Then I heard that they're going to rip out the garden in a couple months, in my mind reducing the garden to a mere photo op for our jolly green would-be governor. Ick. Just what this country needs, another hollow gesture toward environmental sustainability rather than the bold collective action that we actually need to tackle serious problems like climate change, resource depletion, and a wasteful, polluting, and ineffective global food system.

The stock market took another tumble today on the work that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which guarantee a large percentage of the mortagages in the United States, are in crisis and may be nearing collapse. Word is that the Bush Administration may have to step in with a bailout plan that could compare with the massive S&L bailout of the early 1990s.

Why are the two giant corporations, without which the entire housing market could collapse, in so much trouble? Dave Iverson discussed that on forum this morning, and some interesting points came out. According to his guest, Thomas Davidoff, a business-school professor at Berkeley, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were doing what short-term profit-seeking companies do -- investing in instruments that do well when the economy is doing well, particularly, and ironically, in mortage-backed securities. Now that the housing markets are tanking, and those securities have fallen in value, and the two companies are facing huge liabilities for the mortgages they guaranteed, the taxpayers are going to have to step in.

But here's what a lot of people forget: Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association, was originally a government agency, created by Roosevelt as part of the New Deal. In 1968, it was privatized. Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, was never a public entity, but was created to provide competition in the market when Fannie Mae was privatized. (By the way, these are the outfits that have made the securitization of morgtages possible.)

But of course, both have operated with what finance experts call an "implicit guarantee" of federal backing. Everyone assumes that if they screw up, Uncle Sam will come to the rescue.

So we have the worst of both worlds: A private outfit making bad investment decisions because there's no real downside fear -- and the taxpayers, who have little control over it, having to foot the bill.

Privatization has done such wonders for the mortgage-finance market, eh? Perhaps President Obama and Speaker Pelosi will have enough sense to stop bailing these companies out and turn them back into government agencies.

Cecilia Vega -- who covers Mayor Gavin Newsom for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she broke big stories ranging from the big sex scandal to the mayor's extravagant spending during hard times -- has taken a job with KGO-TV Channel 7 covering Oakland City Hall.
It's a loss for the newspaper industry, which Vega has worked in for about 10 years, reporting for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and San Bernardino Sun before joining the Chron four years ago. But Vega -- who has been a colleague of mine on the City Desk News Hour (a TV show she'll also be leaving) for the last couple years -- sees it as a good opportunity during these trying times for the Chron, which has made deep staff cuts to cope with declining readership and big financial losses.
"Making the decision to leave newspapers wasn't easy -- even in these uncertain times in the industry. It's not something I ever thought I would do. But I've got a great opportunity to learn a new form of story telling at Channel 7. And besides, with all the scandals going on in Oakland City Hall right now, what political reporter isn't itching to do stories there? It's an exciting opportunity I just couldn't pass up," Vega told me.
Her last day at the Chron is July 25 and she'll be starting her new gig in early September after getting married in August. The word is reporter Erin Allday, a novice to political reporting, will take over the Newsom beat.

By John Bardis

Mayor Newsom has proposed some disturbing legislation. He wants whistleblower citizens to pay a $500 filing fee to exercise the right to request the Planning Commission to hold a public hearing on proposed construction projects that might violate the Planning Code.

What a shameful example of misguided legislation in San Francisco. It’s akin to the Mayor of Boston in 1775 requiring Paul Revere to pay a fee before he could ride to sound the alarm that “The British are coming!”

Instead of encouraging citizen participation in our democracy, the mayor is promoting a plutocracy. While residents in wealthier neighborhoods like Pacific Heights and Sea Cliff will be able to afford this proposed fee increase, its imposition discriminates against citizens living in the less affluent neighborhoods.

A Request for Discretionary Review is a cornerstone of the planning process. Residents can exercise their right to request a public hearing on a proposed construction project that might violate the city’s Planning Code or Master Plan.

Years ago, there was no fee for filing a Request for Discretionary Review. In those days, civic leaders welcomed volunteers who gave freely of their time to provide an invaluable service for our city by monitoring proposed construction projects to ensure they complied with the law -- and blowing the whistle on developers violating the law.

Back then, all costs associated with processing a Request for Discretionary Review were logically and rightfully included as part of the fee charged for the filing of building-permit applications. City officials recognized that, since the submission of a questionable building permit application triggered the Request for Discretionary Review, it was only reasonable that the burden of all costs associated with the processing the request should fall on the developer.

This is not the case today. The city began requiring citizens to pay a fee for filing a Request for Discretionary Review, which presently is a ridiculous $300. And now Mayor Newsom has proposed to add insult to injury by increasing this fee by 67.5% to an absurd $500.

The mayor’s proposal penalizes less affluent citizens and neighborhoods by restricting their right to protest questionable developments by raising the financial hurdle for citizen participation. It discourages all citizens from participating actively in the city’s planning process by sending a punishing financial signal that their participation is not wanted.

On June 19, 2008 the Planning Department and Planning Commission ignored public protests over this fee increase and voted to recommend that the Board of Supervisors approve it.

At its meeting on Tuesday, July 15th, the Board of Supervisors will take up the mayor’s misguided proposal. The mayor and our city officials should encourage rather than discourage and penalize San Franciscans – our citizen volunteer “Paul Reveres” who sound the alarm about possible code violations that make possible the lawful implementation of San Francisco’s Planning Code.

The Board of Supervisors should reject the 67.5% fee increase – if not the entire fee altogether! The Board should amend the legislation to recover any such costs associated with the filing of a Request for Discretionary Review by making an appropriate increase the fees charged for building permit applications.

John Bardis is a former San Francisco Supervisor and former President of the Coalition San Francisco Neighborhoods..

The following is an email exchange between me and Nathan Ballard, the mayor’s press secretary, on the subject of the Clean Energy Act. It raises some interesting questions; I thought I’d just post it without further comment.

ME: Will Mayor Newsom be endorsing the Clean Energy Act?

NATHAN BALLARD: Check with Jaye.

ME: Thanks, I will. A private political consultant is now speaking for the mayor on policy positions?

BALLARD: I don't use public resources/time to comment about endorsements on ballot measures, candidate races, etc. Eric Jaye is Newsom's point of contact for the media on such issues.

ME: Interesting. How long as this been your policy? (And by the way, I don't think the Clean Energy Act is a ballot measure yet. It's still before the board of supervisors. So you can't speak for the mayor about his positions
on pending legislation?)

I'm also intrigued by the possibility of serious conflicts here. Eric Jaye is often involved in local political campaigns as a paid consultant. Should he be speaking for the mayor if he is getting paid to take one side on an issue?

BALLARD: Yes, I can speak for the Mayor on pending legislation. Once it's on the ballot, I probably shouldn't. Anyways, I don't know of any local legislation called the Clean Energy Act. Do send me the text and I'll see
if the Mayor wants to express an opinion to you about it.

As to your question about Eric Jaye, it sounds like you are suggesting that he is doing something wrong. I know and respect Eric, and so I know that you are on the wrong track. His professional ethics are unimpeachable. But
instead of spreading rumors about Eric through third parties, why don't you just pick up the phone and call him with your accusations? I am confident that he will be quite happy to set you straight.

ME: Eric Jaye informs me that since he is, in fact, working for PG&E in opposition to the Clean Energy Act, he has a conflict (as I had suspected) and can't speak for the mayor on this issue.

There was a hearing on the measure this week, and I'm sure the mayor is aware of it and what it entails. Can you let me know if he has taken a position or plans to?

Thanks for your help.

BALLARD: The Mayor says he is aware of this legislation and he is looking into it.

San Francisco's proposal to install several combustion turbines, or "peaker" plants, in the southeast neighborhoods has created a firestorm of protest, particularly from environmentalists who don't want the city building any new fossil-fuel plants.

I get that. I also know that PG&E has its dirty little fingers in the public-policy pie. And that makes it more complicated.

The lastest proposal, which comes out of the mayor's office, calls for Mirant Corp. to retrofit its own peakers, clean them up, run them on natural gas, and put that power into the grid so the city doesn't have to build its own plants. The argument is that Mirant's peakers would be cleaner than the city's, and might run less often.

I've always thought that leaving Mirant in control is a terrible idea. If we want to tell the state that we aren't going to build any new fossil-fuel plants, then let's stick to it, and rely entirely on renewables (at the possible risk of brownouts in high-use periods). But I don't trust Mirant for a second -- and I don't think the mayor has any legal guarantee that Mirant will do what it says it will.

All that said, I got an interesting communication this weekend from Joe Boss, who's a Potrero Hill activist. He and Tony Kelly are worried that the Mayor and Mirant will wind up creating the worst possible scenario: The big Mirant plant, with its smokestack and pollution, will continue to operate for the forseeable future.

It's admittedly a bit of a speculative scenario, and a lot of things would have to go wrong for it to happen. (Among other things, Mirant, which loses its permit to use Bay water for cooling at the end of this year, would have to invest in a big new air-cooling system.) But it's worth putting out there as the supervisors prepared to decide on the fate of the city peakers.

You can read Boss's perpective after the jump.

Warren Hickle over at the argonaut is all in a tizzy about the prospect that mayor's budget reduces the regularity of mechanized street sweeping on the west side of town. But I have to agree with the commenters at sfist -- most neighborhoods would be thrilled to have those damn street sweeping machines gone.

Street sweeping is a tax on people who own cars but don't have enough money to have garages. That's mostly tenants. I'm all for getting rid of cars, and I'm all for taxing them, but the tax ought to be fair: Charge everyone who owns a car in SF a set fee a year, or even better, charge a fee based on the value of the car, so the rich pay more. Or levy a tax based on the weight of the vehicle (hits SUVs) or the gas mileage (ditto).

The sweeping is mostly a regressive way to bring in revenue for the city. I live in a part of town where we don't have any street cleaning program, and our streets are just fine.

Besides, it's kind of environmentally dumb: If you use your car once a week or less, isn't it better to leave it parked instead of starting it up every couple of days and driving it around to avoid the street sweepers?

I can see sweeping on Mission, 16th Street, Haight Street and other major commercial strips, but why would anybody on the west side be mad about losing a service that costs a lot, does little good and amounts to a bad tax?

A GUARDIAN EDITORIAL

The supervisors are meeting a day late this week, thanks to the San Francisco Examiner’s screw-up, which means that a key vote on the city-owned combustion turbines, or peakers, will probably come Wednesday, July 16. The mayor, with some environmental backing, wants the board to kill the city peakers and leave Mirant Corp, a private power company, with the responsibility of generating extra electricity in San Francisco during peak use periods. That’s the worst possible scenario.

We recognize the contradictions inherent in any city plan to construct new fossil-fuel generation plants. San Francisco ought to be moving away from any energy solution that increases carbon emissions, and if the city wants to simply ban any facilities that burn anything to generate electricity, we would by sympathetic.
But that’s not the choice here. The mayor (and Pacific Gas and Electric Company) want to continue using natural-gas-fired turbines to generate electricity in southeast San Francisco. They just want a private company, not a public agency, running the plants.

And we’ve seen no legally binding, written guarantee that Mirant will close its big, polluting Unit 3 under the deal.
There’s some dispute about whether Mirant will operate cleaner peakers than the city, but there’s no dispute about the fact that a private company will be far less accountable than a city department that will soon by run by commissioners who must be approved by the supervisors. And if the city kills the peakers, it will have no leverage at all over what Mirant might be required to do.

The supervisors need to leave their options open here and hold off on killing the public-power peaker plan until the public can see, review, and participate in hearings on binding agreements for the future of Mirant’s plant. As Potrero Hill activist Tony Kelly, who has been working on this issue for years, put it in an email to us:
“I have to emphasize that a vote in favor of the CTs tomorrow doesn't have to lock the city into the CTs; there's already an amendment to the ordinances giving the city an out in case another program (Mirant retrofit, or transmission only) turns out to be better. However, if tomorrow's ordinances fail, or are tabled, then the CTs go away as an option. That's the problem.

Because it really looks like the PUC will formally rescind the public CTs next Tuesday, in their last act of defiance and corruption; and that will kill the public CTs, and then Mirant holds all the cards to do whatever it wants to do from then on.”

Again: We’re open to a solution that involves neither the city-run peakers nor Mirant. But we've been around long enough to know that when the mayor, PG&E and a private power-plant owner are mucking around with energy policy, you have to be very, very careful before you trust what comes out of the discussion. We don’t trust Mirant for a second, and the supervisors shouldn’t give up the city's leverage too early.

Photo from Portland's recent ciclovia by Steven T. Jones

It's not easy to create carfree spaces in automobile-obsessed California, even temporary ones, as Mayor Gavin Newsom is starting to learn. His proposal to create a carfree "ciclovia" along the Embarcadero from Bayview to Chinatown was already scaled back from his original proposal of three consecutive Sundays in August to the recently approved plan for four-hour events on Aug. 31 and Sept. 14.
Merchant groups from Pier 39 and Fisherman's Wharf lost their minds, screaming with fears of lost business even though motorists will still be able to access their tourist traps by car, and they'll be joined by thousands of people pedaling, walking and skating past their businesses during prime breakfast and lunch hours. And now members of the Board of Supervisors have added their voices to this shrill chorus.
I knew there would be outrage, and there has been opposition in every city where it's been tried (and it's ultimately become popular everywhere it's been tried). Unfortunately, Newsom has a history of caving in to overentitled motorists. So the challenge now for Newsom -- and for all of us concerned about climate change, public health, and the promotion of sustainable forms of transportation -- is to do what's right in the face of fearful proponents of the status quo.
Because creating eight hours per year of carfree space along the San Francisco waterfront is the least we can do.

I'm not surprised that Matt Smith is once again looking for ways to bash the left, and that the SF Weekly is once again looking for ways to attack public power. But Smith's latest piece is really screwy.

His thesis seems to be that the public-power movement is supporting the move to build city-owned power plants at the foot of Potrero Hill. Actually, that's completely wrong.

There's a measure headed for the fall ballot called the Clean Energy Act that would, among other things, move the city toward public power. But it has very little to do with the battle over the power plants.

The two cosponsors of the Clean Energy Act, Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin, are on opposite sides of the power-plant issue. And even a cursory read of the Guardian blogs demonstrates that the activists are by no means of one mind on this.

The whole idea that the peakers were a public-power plot is pretty laughable, since NONE of the leading public-power activists had anything to do with the idea in the first place. (And later, when it came out of the SFPUC -- which again, has NEVER been a bastion of public-power activism) some of us liked the idea and some of us didn't.

And the Peskin measure that Smith talks about has nothing to do with public power either.

This is so obvious that San Francisco ought to be signing on right away (and pushing the speaker of the house to make is happen).

Advocates for bicycling, walking, and the creation of more carfree spaces were already in full battle mode this week over challenges to Sunday Streets, Mayor Gavin Newsom's plan to close the Embarcadero to cars for four hours each on Aug. 31 and Sept. 14. Then came word that the Bicycle Plan -- which the city must complete in order to lift a two-year-old court injunction against any bike-related projects -- is falling behind schedule once again.

The two unrelated setbacks will be the subjects of a pair of hearings at City Hall on Monday, events likely to fill their respective hearing rooms with angry bicyclists, angry business people, and angry political proxies of all stripes.
First up is a 10 a.m. hearing at the Board of Supervisors Government Audit and Oversight Committee on a pair of measures by Sup. Aaron Peskin: one a resolution calling for detailed economic studies before the Sunday Streets events, the other an ordinance that would require board approval for new athletic events that require street closure.

Then the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has scheduled a 12:30 rally on City Hall steps before the 1 p.m. Land Use Committee hearing, which will include an update on the Bike Plan progress that was requested by Sup. Gerardo Sandoval after learning that work on the plan has fallen months behind schedule due consultants missing deadlines and other bureaucratic delays.

Chris Daly and Robert Haaland are reporting that Aaron Peskin has lined up the votes to become the next chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party.

It's been a long and contested fight, and Daly now says it's over, and that Scott Wiener, Peskin's opponnent, should essentially drop out.

But Wiener has no intention of backing down; in fact, he just told me by phone that he disagrees with Daly's claim.

"It's pure spin," he said. "I have more committed votes than Aaron does."

Peskin remains confident that he'll prevail at the July 23 meeting and that more than half of the 34 voting members are lined up behind him. As for Wiener's comment, he said: "On Wednesday night, one of us will be right and one of us will be wrong."

Of course, neither side is releasing a list of names, since there's still intense lobbying going on behind the scenes.

Should be a wild meeting.

Judge Marla Miller July 18th rejected attempts by the SF Weekly and its chain owner to overturn the Bay Guardian’s victory and $16 million jury award in a predatory pricing case.

The ruling on the defendants’ post-trial motions marked the end of the first full round of this legal fight and sets the stage for a shift to the California Court of Appeal. All that remains to be decided by Judge Miller is the Guardian’s upcoming motion for attorneys’ fees, which are expressly allowed to a prevailing party under the California Unfair Practices Act.

SF Weekly and Village Voice Media had asked Miller to overturn the jury verdict or order a new trial, and the company lawyers spent hours July 8th arguing that the evidence presented in a five-week trial didn’t justify the jury’s decision. And they claimed, in a laundry list of challenges, that Miller had issued improper jury instructions and erred in admitting evidence at trial.

Defense attorneys James Wagstaffe and H. Sinclair Kerr also tried to get the judge to overturn the 16-paper chain’s liabilty for any damages awarded by the jury. That would have left the Weekly as the only guilty party. VVM had admitted in earlier post-trial proceedings that the Weekly has a negative net worth and alone would be unable to pay the Guardian anywhere near $16 million.

Miller, with little comment, denied those requests.

In her "order denying defendants' motion for new trial" Miller stated:

"To the extent that the motion for New Trial is based upon the grounds of insufficiency of the evidence to justify the verdict (Civil Procedure Code #657(6) and excessive damages (Civil Procedure Code #657(5) the court has weighed the evidence and is not convinced from the entire record, including reasonable inferences therefrom, that the jury clearly should have reached a different verdict. To the extent that the motion for New Trial is based upon errors at law which Defendants contend occurred at the trial and were excepted to by them (Civil Procedure #657(7), the Court finds these contentions lack merit.”

The defendants have said they plan to appeal.

The case centered around the Guardian’s charge that the Weekly had for years violated California’s Unfair practices Act by selling advertising space below the cost of producing it for the purpose of injuring the locally owned, independent competitor.

Evidence presented at trial showed that the Weekly had consistently lost money, as much as $2 million a year, since New Times, now known as VVM, bought the paper in 1995.

The chain later bought the East Bay Express, and transformed it from a profitable paper to one that consistently lost money. Between the Weekly and the Express, VVM has lost some $25 million in San Francisco.

The evidence also showed that VVM’s executive editor, Michael Lacey, had vowed to put the Guardian out of business, and that Weekly advertising and business staff were instructed to try to take business away from the Guardian by below cost pricing, whatever the sacrifice in revenue and profits.

And while the VVM lawyers mounted a convoluted legal argument to claim that the parent company wasn’t legally liable for any damages, the trial showed that the senior executives at the Phoenix-based chain were not only aware of the predatory strategy but were active participants in enabling the Weekly to carry out its pervasive program of below-cost sales..

In fact, two senior officers, CFO Jed Brunst and Controller Jeff Mars, testified on the stand or in pretrial depositions that the SF Weekly would have gone out of business years ago if the chain hadn’t made a policy of shipping large sums of money from headquarters into the San Francisco operation to subsidize below-cost sales.

After the trial, jurors said they were convinced that VVM sought to destroy local competition. Juror Kerstin Sjoquist, a local business owner and graduate student, said in an interview that “it felt overly predatory on the part of the Weekly” and that “the predatory intent trickled down from the top.”

Although the VVM lawyers have 60 days to file their notice of appeal, there’s already some indication of what the chain will try to argue to the higher court. Even before the trial started, Andy Van De Voorde, VVM executive associate editor, who flew in from Denver to cover the trial for the Weekly, argued in his blogs that the California Unfair Practices Act was out of date and irrelevant. Referring to the act as a “depression era law,” (actually, the act dates back to 1913, California’s Progressive Era), Van De Voorde suggested that modern competitive markets made such a law pointless.

The law bars any business from selling a product or service below cost with the intent to harm a competitor or destroy competition. That prohibition has been upheld by many appellate court decisions, some as recent as the 21st century. The state Legislature has reviewed and even amended that part of the state code many times in recent decades, but has declined to make any fundamental changes in the protections afforded by the Unfair Practices Act.

And the trend toward chain ownership and consolidation of businesses in everything from coffee shops to bookstores and hair salons would seem to suggest that the need for a law protecting independent local merchants from predatory chains is greater than ever today.

That's certainly true for the news media: One company new owns almost every daily newspaper in the Bay Area.

Both before and after the trial, the VVM lawyers also argued that a ban on predatory pricing would violate the Weekly’s First Amendment rights. If the paper was forced to live within its means – that is, to raise ad rates and stop relying on big subsidies from the chain – Weekly managers might have to cut the size of the staff, thus reducing editorial coverage, the lawyers argued.

Two judges – first Richard Kramer, who handled pre-trial rulings, and later Miller – rejected that argument wholesale.

As the Guardian’s lawyers argued, newspapers have always had to follow basic business regulations – even when they might cost money that could have gone to editorial staffing. No newspaper has ever seriously tried to claim that labor laws, or environmental laws, or workplace-safety laws, or tax laws were a First Amendment violation.

Still, those claims may appear again in the appellate briefs.

Meanwhile, the costs to VVM and the Weekly will continue to rise: If the verdict is upheld on appeal, the chain will have to pay interest on the jury award, which is now accruing at about $4,300 a day. And at this point the Guardian has an additional statutory right to recover reasonable attorney’s fees, which could add a substantial amount to the current judgment of more than $16 million

The Guardian’s lawyers are Ralph Alldredge, Richard Hill and E. Craig Moody.

You can read the Guardian's key legal brief on the post-trial motions here. For a detailed history of the case, click here

Damn, we just can't pass this one up. A commenter over at the SF Weekly's blog posted a message agreeing with Benjamin Wachs that there are some fine folks in the Midwest contrary to what so many San Franciscans seem to believe. I won't speak for rest of the newsroom here, but I agree with Wachs, too. I grew up in Tulsa and resent any implication that Oklahomans are somehow dysfunctional because popular pundits have encouraged the country to divide each state into two colors and thus make broad assumptions about millions of people. But there's a problem. Read the comment closely:

Posted at: July 17, 2008 10:54 AM

Dan says:
When San Francisco got too expensive in the late 90s, the ex and I took our freelancing selves to a small town in the Midwest. The generalizations made by the coasters were always amusing to read; our small town of about six thousand was populated by other refugees from big towns, artists and radicals and iconoclasts made it something of a weekend destination and arts center. These people had real cultural connections and credentials but very little of the pretension you'd find at, say, the Lexington (which, more than likely, is jammed butt to nut with a bunch of people who are actually from the Midwest and would be mortified if you found out). I found that we did travel more than when we lived in California. But that was mostly because we were still making San Francisco wages but paying small town Midwestern rent.

Wait. Huh? Wha? Are you talking about the Lexington in the Mission? You've been there before, right? Are you sure your parenthetical description of it is, uh, accurate? You're right about one thing, however. The Lexington, like so many other places in town, contains a lot of refugees from elsewhere who may actually be proud of where they came from but couldn't stand being treated like second-class citizens there anymore.

Bicyclists expressed their outrage, politicians offered their support, and bureaucrats said they’d do what they could to speed up the slow-moving environmental work on the city’s Bicycle Plan, which a judge says the city must complete before making any bicycle system improvements.
But for those seeking near-term relief to a stalemate expected to last at least another year found little solace during yesterday’s Land Use Committee hearing on the latest Bike Plan delays. Instead, they were offered a culprit: the California Environmental Quality Act.
The 38-year-old law was the basis for the legal challenge that led to a court injunction against new bike projects, and all involved with the plan note how perverse it is for the state’s premier environmental law to be holding up efforts to promote bicycling, an unqualified environmental good.
“It’s truly ironic that an activity that is inherently environmentally friendly is being challenged under an environmental law,” Planning Director John Rahaim, who moved here from Seattle last year, said at the hearing.

Scene from last month's ciclovia in Portland, Photo by Steven T. Jones

Sunday Streets, a proposal to bring to San Francisco’s Embarcadero the carfree ciclovias that have caught on in major cities around the world, became mired in the dysfunctional relations between Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors after Fisherman’s Wharf merchants freaked out.

But even before the full board yesterday considered the resolution by Sups. Aaron Peskin, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Sean Elsbernd demanding the Aug. 31 and Sept. 14 events be postponed until a detailed economic impact analysis can be done, the Mayor’s Office had already announced the events would proceed as scheduled, critics be damned.

“The mayor’s position on Sunday Streets will not change. We will go ahead as scheduled,” Mike Farrah, head of the Office of Neighborhood Services and a longtime Newsom loyalist, told the Guardian on Monday.

In the face of that stand, and with Farrah and other event proponents promising to work with business community critics to massage the plan, Peskin opted to delayed consideration of his resolution until the Aug. 5 meeting. Yet Sup. Chris Daly (who supports Sunday Streets even though he calls it a Newsom publicity stunt) also decided to up the ante yesterday by introducing legislation to permanently ban cars from Market Street.

Before the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee voted tonight on its new chair, Chris Daly told me the vote was going to be 18-16 in favor of Aaron Peskin, the progressives' pick. I didn't doubt him. The play was going to be to elect Peskin temporary chair as the first order of business, before the public comment or chair election agenda items, and make it clear from the get-go where the votes were.

There was a mild and brief parliamentary scrum before the names of Peskin and Scott Wiener, last term's chair and the pick of the moderates, were put up for vote. Peskin won on a 18-16 vote.

"You have my word that I'm going to work my butt off and I'm going to do it with Scott," Peskin said during his acceptance speech before Wiener supporters reminded him he was only temporary chair and the real vote was still coming up. But I didn't doubt it was over.

I listened to the first speaker during public comment, Senator-to-be Mark Leno, sound conciliatory notes and praise the soon-to-be vanquished candidate he supported. And then I left as the speakers lined up at the microphone to make the case for their respective candidates, telling Daly to call me if the official vote wasn't 18-16.

Here at the hyper-local Bay Guardian, we don’t get to write about international organized crime all too often, but it’s something we truly enjoy studying when we’re off the clock. Thankfully, we were able to hoodwink our editors into allowing us to examine the subject during precious work time for this week’s cover story. Suckers.

For those of you who appreciated our profile of human rights investigator Kathi Austin, we’ve got a wealth of additional material below for you to check out, some of it great stuff we hated having to pull from the story due to space constraints and some of it links to other highly informative stories and academic studies on small-arms proliferation in the developing world.

As for Victor Bout’s arrest earlier this year in Thailand, the Russian government has reportedly worked behind the scenes to have him delivered back to Moscow. But Washington’s relatively new attorney general, Michael Mukasey, emerged from meetings during a recent trip to Bangkok declaring that the case for his extradition was “very strong,” according to press accounts. Bout has an extradition hearing in Thailand on July 28.

He fled to Moscow several years ago, probably in 2002, evading an Interpol arrest warrant in the process. Russia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States, but leaving his safe confines in Moscow and heading to Thailand made him vulnerable to the arrest that occurred in February.

A photo of the arms tycoon from Agence France-Presse – one of the few seen publicly – quickly circled the globe after his capture and showed Bout dressed in a polo shirt and moustache with trim, nut-brown hair. Two massive arms are stuffed into a pair of handcuffs as he glowers at the camera and his considerable size dwarfs the Thai policemen walking next to him.

We first learned about Austin’s pursuit of Bout after reading the definitive book on him published last year by two American journalists, Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible. The co-authors are Douglas Farah, a former West African bureau chief for the Washington Post, and Stephen Braun, a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. The duo thanks Austin for opening up her files during their research for the book, and Merchant of Death is a must-read for anyone interested in human rights and disarmament.

More after the jump.

Lord of War, 2005

If the would-be developers of a massive grocery store and condo project at the corner of Haight and Stanyan streets hope to win over the community they want to serve, the nasty hit piece they mailed out this week attacking activist Calvin Welch was exactly the wrong way to go.

The project is sort of a political wobbler. Everyone is anxious to get another grocery store into the former Cala Foods site, but the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (of which Welch is a key member) has understandably raised concerns about the scale of the proposed project, which includes 62 condos, a Whole Foods of up to 35,000 square feet (more than double the old Cala), and three stories of underground parking that will generate about 2000 new car trips per day at the already congested intersection.

Yet rather than trying to work with the community, developer Mark Brennan resorted to character assassination that was both childish and ageist, slamming Welch as a “fossil” who is maniacally trying to maintain blight and keep fresh food away from hungry children. He even took a few swipes at Dist. 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi – clearly, not a smart move.

As Welch told us, “This hit piece is a desperate act of a desperate bunch.”

Earlier this month we reported on Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, a 17-year-old immigrant farm worker whose heat-related death sparked a public outcry against Trader Joe’s and their cheaper-than-thou “Two-buck Chuck” wine.

Jimenez was employed by Merced Farm Labor, which contracts with the same company that supplies the grapes that go into the infamous $2 a bottle Charles Shaw wine, sold exclusively at Trader Joe’s. While Jimenez was not picking grapes specifically for that wine, United Farm Workers asked supporters to pressure Trader Joe's to ensure that their vendors are contracting with responsible companies.

Jimenez’s death also instigated an investigation by California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA), into Merced Farm Labor’s protocols. Today, the state agency announced they’re citing the company for three alleged serious and willful violations of state laws. Penalties could run as much as $263,000.

Makes putting out a little water and shade for your workers look a lot more affordable.

Yeah, we know. It hasn’t rained in months and fires, not floods, are on your mind.

But we couldn’t help noticing that 16 months after the Guardian broke the news that San Francisco is the only city in the Bay Area that does not have a flood map, (even though its surrounded by water on three sides, and sea level is on the rise, thanks to climate change), the Board of Supervisors is deciding whether to authorize enrollment in the National Flood Insurance Program and establish a floodplain management program.

The way things stand, the City has a map of “subsidence areas,” but not much else.

Right now, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is preparing a Flood Insurance Rate Map for the City and County of SF.

That map, which should be published in early 2009, will provide flood risk information for insurance and floodplain management purposes.

It could also affect development in SF.

As the ordinance that Sup. Sean Elsbernd authored notes, “FEMA’s publication of a final FIRM for San Francisco may affect new development in San Francisco, especially renovation and reuse of finger piers.”
Elsbernd’s legislation “urges the Port of San Francisco and FEMA to develop, before that final map gets published, long-term floodplain management controls that both address any flooding hazard risks and allow the City to implement the Waterfront Land Use Plan and the Capital Plan…and achieve the goals of that Plan, including the preservation of historic piers.”

Mayor Gavin Newsom has made his recommendations for the five seats on the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, up for grabs after voters passed Prop E in June. His choices reflect a little out with the old, in with the new, but he’s also passed up a commissioner he appointed just a year ago and selected a veteran member who barely squeaked through the last approval process.

So, who has Newsom picked?

The Rules Committee of the Board of Supervisors voted Monday to forward the appointment of Nora Vargas to the SF Public Utilities Commission, without recommendation. The three supervisors on the committee (Tom Ammiano, Chris Daly, and Bevan Dufty) all expressed concern that Vargas’ lack of experience with local politics and public utilities issues might be a setback should she fill the seat.

Vargas is director of Latino Issues Forum, a statewide nonprofit advocacy group, with offices in Fresno, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. LIF works on healthcare reform, educational issues, and consumer rights for immigrants and Latino populations. Vargas would fill the ratepayer advocate seat on the PUC.

Vargas, when questioned by the Rules Committee, said she felt confident of her ability to act independently of her appointing authority, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and that she would put ratepayers and consumers first. When asked if she’d be able to push back against powerful entities like Pacific Gas and Electric, which takes an active interest in many things the SFPUC control, Vargas cited her experience advocating on behalf of ratepayers at the California Public Utilities Commission.

We know PG&E likes to spread their money and influence throughout the city. In this case, between 2004 and 2006, PG&E has given $150,000 to Latino Issues Forum, as part of their community grantmaking.

This is the same kind of giving that would presumably end should San Francisco voters approve the Clean Energy Act this November. “We no longer will be contributing to San Francisco’s non-profits and service organizations,” PG&E’s Brandon Hernandez told a June 27 meeting of the Rule Committee, at which they voted to put the Clean Energy Act on the November ballot. The measure calls for San Francisco to move toward 100 percent clean and renewable energy, possibly through public construction and ownership, thus putting PG&E out of business in this city.

Additionally, Guillermo Rodriguez, Jr., former public relations flak for PG&E, is on the board of Latino Issues Forum (along with two other private utility executives.) Rodriguez left PG&E to head the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which also receives lots and lots of PG&E's money on a regular basis.

Vargas’ appointment to the SFPUC is up for approval by the full Board of Supervisors at today’s meeting, along with Newsom’s four other appointments – Ann Moller Caen, FX Crowley, Francesca Vietor, and Dick Sklar. Sklar, at the last PUC meeting, withdrew his candidacy for the seat.