Conservative SF capitalists waste $633,000
Click here to give something back for all downtown has given.
By Steven T. Jones
It'll take awhile to get a full accounting of all the money that downtown's would-be power brokers spent in their apparently fruitless effort to buy the Board of Supervisors, but my calculation of all of their independent expenditures attacking swing district supervisorial candidates Eric Mar, David Chiu, and John Avalos -- and supporting their more conservative opponents -- comes to about $633,000.
We won't know for sure whether the election day results will hold after the final absentee and provisional votes are tallied and the ranked choice voting formulas are run, which starts tomorrow, but the consensus of the political number crunchers at yesterday's SPUR post-election event was that Mar, Chiu, and Avalos look like the winners. That means the $633,000 -- which was perhaps chump change for these wealthy interest groups -- succeeded only in sullying the campaign with the nastiest and most dishonest attacks of the season -- and clearly identifying who's hostile to progressives, renters, labor, and other working class San Franciscans.
That group includes: Association of Realtors (which spent more than any local group except PG&E, apparently using money extracted during the housing bubble to try to perpetuate public policies and priorities that discriminate against renters), Building Owners and Managers Association, Coalition for Responsible Growth, Committee on Jobs, Police Officers Association, Plan C, (and the following groups who are new since our last report on the IEs), San Francisco Republican Party Central Committee, SF Taxpayers Union, San Francisco Democratic Club (the fake party organ created by Newsom henchman Tom Hseih), Asian American Contractors Association (which attacked Asian Chiu and supported super white Joe Alioto -- clearly they're blind to all colors but green), SF Small Business Advocates, and consultant Jack Davis (who personally spend $8,429 on a nasty last-minute mailer smearing Chiu, who won by a bigger margin than anyone thought...so much for the legendary Davis, who likes to saber-rattle but hasn't been effective in years at anything but shaking down Gavin Newsom for money). And this tally doesn't even include the $10 million that Pacific Gas & Electric spent to successfully defeat Prop. H, the Clean Energy Act, a campaign that joined the IEs in trying to demonize Chris Daly and progressives on the Board of Supervisors.
Next up, the Ethics Commission will give us a full accounting of all the the big-money campaigns, and not just the dollars. There have been regular indications through the campaign that these supposedly "independent" expenditures were actually illegally coordinated with one another and with the candidates they supported, including candidates Joe Alioto, Sue Lee, and Ahsha Safai. The Association of Realtors also made some intentionally inaccurate accusations on its mailers and television ads.
The last PG&E campaign against a public power measure, in 2002, resulted in the biggest fine that Ethics has ever levied. And at a time when Newsom is proposing deep cuts in Ethics and other departments, now is probably a good time to aggressively investigate all the many misdeeds in this election and put some more of downtown's money into the public coffers, rather than simply wasting it all on consultants and mailers.
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