Sweet Melissa

The Net-Net could be a Win-Win for Adachi and Lee

After Public Defender Jeff Adachi announced his intention to run for mayor last Friday, some friends and I convened to discuss the issue. We didn’t agree on anything except the fact that none of us saw this coming. But perhaps we should have.

While it’s not an exact indicator, with 43 percent of voters in favor of his pension proposal last year, Adachi has a built-in base of folks concerned with fiscal responsibility and sick of the incestuous relationship between unions and city officials. Know who else’s fan club has a lot of members who are concerned about our City’s bottom line? Ed Lee.

Known (rightfully or not) for keeping Twitter in town and negotiating a pension reform measure, Lee appeals to some moderates who want to trust that whomever is mayor won’t be hostile to business or give away the farm to public employee unions. Now Adachi threatens to law claim to that demographic and everyone to the right of it. (Sorry, Tony Hall.)

So, how does Ed Lee deal with Jeff Adachi? In a ranked choice voting situation, the best way to deal with a rival for your base is to get them on your side. How might Lee get Adachi’s support? Does Lee have something that Adachi wants? You betcha: a pension solution. Having two mutually exclusive pension measures on the ballot means that neither is likely to pass.

Remember that a few months ago, Adachi offered to withdraw his own pension ballot measure if Lee would agree to certain enhancements to the “City Plan” Lee helped negotiate. Lee rejected that offer, but he might just be rethinking a negotiated peace right now.

To be explicit, here’s the scenario: Lee agrees to a pension deal (at this point it would have to be a side-agreement, since the proposals are ballot-ready), Adachi withdraws his pension measure and tells his supporters to vote for himself first and Lee second. Adachi avoids another pension loss at the polls, and he gains points with the Lee administration.

Think this is all farfetched? Don't forget that Willie Brown backed Adachi's pension reform last year and already Adachi’s announcement that he is running for mayor knocked “Ed Lee Lied To Us” out of the headlines. (You’re welcome, Ed! - Jeff)

So, while right now it looks like we will be faced with a Lee/Adachi deuling pension showdown in November, maybe this dance ends exactly where Lee and Adachi want it to: with pension peace for Adachi and a win for Lee in the mayor’s race.

"That was stupid." - my consultant friend re: Nuru's appointment as head of DPW

With the chief of the Department of Public Works, Ed Reiskin, moving over to head the Municipal Transportation Agency, the number one spot at the DPW just opened up. Appointing the new DPW chief is the task of the City Administrator, the job formerly held by Mayor Ed Lee. Lee appointed Amy Brown to be acting City Administrator but her selection of Mohammed Nuru to be acting DPW chief is raising some eyebrows.

Nuru has been the Director of Operations at the DPW since 2000, when he was appointed by then-mayor Willie Brown. Nuru’s aggressive tactics when cleaning up graffiti and clearing sidewalks have earned him the love of some merchants and neighborhood groups, but other elements of his history in the department are not so flattering.

Prior to his appointment as director at DPW, Nuru ran a nonprofit called San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG). When he moved over to the DPW, Nuru oversaw significant grant funding to SLUG, which continued to flow despite serious concerns about the group’s financial shenanigans. A searing 2004 audit by the City Controller accused the SLUG of nonexistent accounting protocols and states, “$62,508 of SLUG’s contract funds were improperly used by Public Works to buy a portable building for itself.” (Audit here: Download Audit.)

Also in 2004 City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office undertook an investigation of allegations that SLUG improperly used employees to engage in campaign activities and did so during working hours. While Nuru declined to be interviewed for the investigation, the resulting report found that in 2003 Nuru had “participated in directing – in alleged instance, coercing – SLUG workers in some of their campaign activities” for (Willie Brown-endorsed) candidates Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris during working hours. (The report: Download ShowDocument1)

WEBSITE BONUS: My favorite part of the report?

One of these witnesses reports having eventually refused to engage in the [campaign] activity, inasmuch as he was a strong Gonzalez supporter and already felt profoundly cheated by having been coerced into voting for Newsom on 2 December on pain of losing his day's pay. When he refused to do more work, according to the witness, Nuru reportedly told him to "get off your ass and get to work." The witness alleges that he did not do as Nuru instructed, instead just sitting in a chair in the Russia Street office for the remainder of the shift.

[This would be funnier if these folks weren't being paid by tax dollars. And if it didn't sound so familiar.] 

As an interim appointment, Nuru’s promotion might have been a blip. (The next mayor can appoint a new administrator who can replace Nuru.) But now that Lee is a candidate for a full term, his ethics and close ties to Willie Brown are under scrutiny. On Monday, mayoral candidate Dennis Herrera accused Leeof “cronyism, politics and poor judgment” in allowing Nuru to take over the helm of the DPW.

Welcome to the race, Ed.

WEBSITE BONUS: Fun facts that got cut - (1) Amy Brown was the Director of Real Estate in 2008-2009 when SLUG was winding down and had to give property to the DPW to settle over $120k in debts to the city for grant money it improperly billed for and/or failed to return. (Resolution No. 189-10.) (2) Ed Lee was the head of DPW when Nuru joined as Director of Operations in 2000. Lee left the DPW in 2005 to be City Administrator.

I'm Bringing Sour Patch Kids. You Bring the Popcorn.

Tomorrow night the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) will select which candidates will get the Democratic Party endorsement for mayor, sheriff, and district attorney in this November’s election.

The DCCC has 32 members. Eight of those seats are occupied by elected officials who are members of the Democratic Party and also live in our (mostly San Francisco) Assembly Districts 12 or 13. Right now, they are: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Congresswomen Nancy Pelosi and Jackie Speier, State Attorney General Kamla Harris, State Senators Mark Leno and Leland Yee, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano and Assemblywoman Fiona Ma.

Last month, DCCC chairman, Aaron Peskin, had Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom taken off the committee because Newsom no longer lives in San Francisco. The move was both justified and savvy: the committee is pretty evenly split between progressives and moderates so getting rid of Newsom’s moderate vote helps the progressive vote count. Tomorrow night’s meeting will hopefully answer two questions.

First, whether the committee will continue its enthusiastic quest for irrelevance by again endorsing candidates with no chance of winning?

Second, whom are the elected officials endorsing? A vote from Pelosi, Feinstein, or Harris would be a welcome boost to any campaign. And with former supervisor Bevan Dufty as the only mayoral candidate with significant support in the gay community thus far (though Herrera gets points for his work on behalf of gay marriage) Leno’s endorsement will be especially valuable.

Mayor Question Time, honestly...

“Mayor’s question time is this Tuesday,” I mentioned to my friend as I perused the Board of Supervisors agenda for today’s meeting.

“Oh, you mean that thing where Mayor Lee shows up at the board with scripted responses to scripted questions and doesn’t really tell us anything?” my friend said.

“That’s the one!”

In an effort to bring you the honesty that should accompany question time, below are the accurate yet slightly paraphrased questions posed by supervisors this week. I also included the answers that I believe Ed Lee would give if he actually were not interested in a full term as mayor.

Question from Supervisor Mark Farrell: How do you plan to stimulate the local economy?

Answer: Charge supervisors $100 for every piece of legislation they propose. We’re doubling that price for resolutions, Supervisor Mar.

Question from Supervisor Carmen Chu: How do you plan to make sure whomever you hire to be the new executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is not an utter disappointment with a wandering eye like the last one?

Answer: We will require each applicant to have more than a Transportation Merit Badge from the last Boy Scout jamboree. Also, we will have a new rule mandating that the executive director must take Muni to all job interviews while in office.

Question from Supervisor Jane Kim: What will you do to keep gang members from killing each other in my district?

Answer: We plan to institute a “guns for thesauruses” program to encourage young people to attack each other with sly repartee and vicious innuendo, instead of bullets. It worked in Dusseldorf, so we are confident it will work here.

Question from Supervisor Scott Wiener: What will you do about the fact that certain property owners are finding themselves charged with tree maintenance because The City cannot afford to take care of all our trees.

Answer: All people in District 6 need to move to District 8 because there are apparently no problems larger than the potential for tree maintenance. Next question.

Question from Supervisor Malia Cohen: Please give us a status update on the efforts to improve the Third Street corridor.

Answer: We plan to declare the corridor a historic district like we have done with the Tenderloin and Civic Center. This way, instead of “presently blighted,” people will just think of it as “formerly awesome.” Just kidding! We have no plans.

SF Elections: It's not like anything could go wrong...right?

On Monday, the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee of the Board of Supervisors held a hearing on the recent report by our voting systems task force. The 57-page document outlines a series of “opportunities” for our voting systems. Since 2007, The City has contracted with Sequoia Voting Systems (later acquired by another company, Dominion Voting Systems), but a “top-to-bottom” review by the California secretary of state that same year found that Sequoia equipment “lacked effective safeguards against corrupted or malicious data.”

in 2008, the task force was charged with coming up with alternatives to equipment that an eighth-grader can hack, and recommending overall election improvements. According to the report, the major issue preventing our use of better voting systems is the onerous process of getting any system certified by the state and federal governments. A full 87 percent of U.S. voting systems are controlled by two vendors.

Waiting around for new voting equipment to be approved while we clunk along on our current system might not be so unsettling if we had an auditing system to catch election irregularities.

That’s right: Our ranked-choice voting elections have thus far not been properly audited. In a regular majority-vote election, you just grab a certain number of ballots in each precinct and count them manually to see if the results are within a certain percentage of the overall total. You just can’t do that with ranked-choice voting. So saith the report: Pulling 1 percent of ballots in each precinct and conducting rounds of elimination “bears no relation to the actual elimination sequence” at the citywide level. As a result, “the manual tally procedure does not verify the outcome of [ranked-choice voting] contests.” Problem is, aside from a full citywide recount, that’s the only procedure we have.

One would think the Board of Supervisors would be concerned about this combination of unsafe and unverifiable election data. But no. After a short PowerPoint presentation by the task force (bless them for their hard work) and a few public comments, the hearing ended quietly.

The zany, ranked-choice mayoral election we’re facing in November is ripe for allegations of impropriety. I vote that our representatives take this issue more seriously.

Adachi wins either way...

Last Wednesday, Public Defender Jeff Adachi held a news conference where he proposed a compromise deal between his Pension Reform Act and Mayor Ed Lee’s proposal. Generally, Adachi gave ground and agreed to smaller contributions from the lowest-paid city employees, and held firm on the higher contributions for people making $80,000 or more.

The Board of Supervisors will vote today on whether to put the mayor’s proposal on the ballot. They also could make amendments to bring the initiative into line with Adachi’s compromise so everyone can hold hands and sing, and we voters will not be forced to do math come November.

But such an outcome is doubtful. The more likely scenario is that we will have two competing proposals on the ballot. The difference is, having offered to compromise, Adachi is laying claim to a pleasant perch on the moral high ground.

Oh, say, can you see all the pols’ surly fights?

Monday was the Fourth of July, which for certain Republican presidential candidates commemorates the day George Washington caught a pigeon at Pearl Harbor.

For the rest of us, it meant celebrating America’s independence from the British by eating burgers, drinking beer and continuing to not give a damn about the royal wedding.

Naturally, City Hall was closed. Here’s how I imagine some folks there spent their time:

•David Chiu: Stuck pins in his Mayor Ed Lee voodoo doll.

•Mayor Ed Lee: Felt pains in his kidneys.

•Ross Mirkarimi: Investigated alleged politician voodoo doll ring by flashing his Huckleberry Hound sheriff’s badge at local toy stores.

•Scott Wiener: Continued to fight the Twitter rumors that he’s "that politician named Weiner."

•Jane Kim: Wishing we were still under British rule so she could wear outlandish bird-covered hats.

•John Avalos: Led a takeover of Alcatraz to protest British imperialism, complete with a drum circle at sunset.

•Eric Mar: Drafted a resolution declaring voodoo amnesty for Lee’s kidneys.

•George Gascón: Watched "Law & Order" marathon. Wasn’t sure whether to root for Law or Order.

•David Campos: Held a hearing on whether San Francisco should be a sanctuary city for locked-out NFL players. Chupalo, Santa Clara!

City Hall tidbits to tide you over until election

July usually brings a fair amount of budget drama, but thanks to the velvet politics of Mayor Ed Lee, this summer has been relatively quiet. Let us enjoy a little gossip during this sitzkrieg before the war for Room 200 begins.

I hear Assemblywoman Fiona Ma plans to run for the State Board of Equalization once her term is up in 2012. The Statewide Redistricting Commission is proposing to extend her district (Assembly District 12) farther south, almost to San Bruno.

So far, no one is indicating a desire to run for the position. The natural choice would be the west side’s golden child, Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, but with a new baby boy in his family, the prospect of schlepping to Sacramento does not appeal to Elsbernd. He said he does not want the position. And, unlike Lee, I believe his denial of ambition.

Speaking of Lee, remember that, regardless of his commitment to sit on the sidelines when it comes to campaigning, if he signs a declaration of candidacy allowing his name to be on November’s mayoral ballot, he forfeits his right to be reappointed city administrator for at least one year. (Remember, a declaration of candidacy is required whether he's on the ballot or the winner of a write-in campaign.)

Actually, come to think of it, Lee lives in Glen Park. That’s in District 12. So, he might have an alternate plan after all.



OT legislation needs a TO

Every couple of seasons, Planet Budget and Planet Election collide and the resulting blast of anti-overtime bombast signals the creation of a legislative black hole. Good intentions and electoral pandering alike are sucked in and disappear, along with the public’s memory of their existence.

And so, Constant Readers, I write to remind you that Supervisor (and mayoral candidate) David Chiu’s recent proposal to curb the use of overtime is just the latest in a string of attempts to legislate a problem that simply cannot be dealt with in The City’s administrative code. Currently, the director of human resources has to give special permission whenever a city employee spends more than the equivalent of 30 percent of his or her regular hours working overtime. Chiu’s legislation would lower that number to 20 percent.

Chiu, and the rest of us, have a right to be concerned. The City’s overtime costs are staggering -  projected to be about $141 million this year, which is $40 million over budget. And there are two general reasons for this: mandatory staffing requirements and union contracts. Trying to attack overtime costs without dealing with both of these factors is pointless election-year sensationalism.

This reality was on display when the Budget and Finance Committee of the Board of Supervisors considered the Fire Department’s budget for this year. In discussing the department’s overtime numbers, Chief Joanne Hayes-White said:

•The cost of providing pensions and benefits when hiring additional employees is so high that it is generally cheaper to simply assign overtime to current employees.

•In 2005, voters passed Proposition F, a requirement that The City maintain and operate all 42 firehouses and specific emergency and rescue vehicles and equipment at the same levels that were used Jan. 1, 2004. Achieving this staffing requirement often means using overtime.

•When asked whether firefighters could conduct safety training during their regular shifts, as opposed to using overtime, Hayes-White pointed out that such a "dual role" would require negotiations with the union.

Chiu asked Hayes-White what effect his proposed legislation would have on the department’s use of overtime. Hayes-White told him point blank that the 20 percent per employee maximum would just mean that overtime is spread out among more employees, and would not reduce the overall amount of overtime needed by the department.

This law is just one more item for the black hole.

Excellent timing, y'all...

Supervisor Scott Wiener’s proposal to allow the Board of Supervisors to make amendments to certain voter-approved initiatives will move forward to the full Board of Supervisors for a vote July 12. If passed, it will be on the November ballot. (Here is the proposal, it has been amended since being introduced, so please read it before leaving hateful comments: Download Wiener Charter Amendment)

Throughout the (FOUR) hearings on this proposal, many people expressed concern about allowing any changes to laws passed by the voters. But the recent additions to the ballot that would change Care Not Cash and the Parkmerced development and would restrict the revenue options for the Recreation and Park Department have made Wiener’s amendment all the more relevant.

As Supervisor Sean Elsbernd said Thursday, “I think what happened Tuesday afternoon is exactly why this charter amendment is necessary. Three ballot measures were placed on the ballot at the very last minute by four members of the Board of Supervisors. And I think in the last 48 hours, we have seen that those ballot measures were written rather hastily. There are all kinds of unintended consequences.”

Perhaps someone should propose an amendment to require public hearings before four supervisors or the mayor can slap sloppy legislation in front of voters who mistakenly trust that someone has reviewed the proposal with a red pen. Until then, Wiener’s proposal is worth a look.