Watching City Hall #359 (4-6-05)
Boys will be boys in the Springtime
Gavin’s all boy inner core staff members fight across the Balboa Café and roll on out into the street wrestling.
Nader & Gonzalez hit the road in Southern California with an all male cast.
The Pope bites the dust in the Vatican surrounded by a hundred cardinals. Guess how many are female?
Top Downtown strategist, jack davis, attacks Newsom for allowing Mitch Katz to dump a gangster element into the City’s only free senior care facility. (All major players are male or gay or both)
My best friend (a female) is tossed off the PAES program by a ‘substitute-acting-on-behalf-of-a-regular-worker-in-conference’ finally giving me a tracking device for what has happened to the thousand or so people the system has dumped but refuses to account for. Here I sit in this great SRO room realizing that for each of us to get such a room, 2 others must be removed from the rolls. I told Trent Rohrer a couple of months ago that he should push for some kind of bond or tax money to pay the actual costs of the Care Not Cash program. Truth is, you can clear the streets but it costs about 10 times what Newsom’s people have been willing to admit. It they went to the voters this November, they could get funds to finish the Care Not agenda. Now, that would be a coup.
Why don’t these guys like real women?
Women have pretty much always controlled my life and I’m grateful for that. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why no one hires women. Newsom’s only female in his inner-circle is from Daly City! Yeah, the one who replaced Joyce Newstat. The women on the right are such losers. All the Dede Wilsey’s with their ‘Terri Schiavo smiles. Whole pages of them in the Chronicle with their brain-dead, botox-frozen eery, full-toothed grins. Maybe I’m answering my own question here. The right wingers control the jobs and all the right wing women are stupid and shallow. Newsom doesn’t have a pool of women like Debra Walker and Barbara Mescunas to choose from. … Of course, answer is that he does have such a pool. Problem is that the frat boys who run his administration are afraid of real women. … Hmmmm, let’s change topics.
“I hear the train a going,
running round the bend.
And, I ain’t had no good times,
Since, I don’t know when.”
If you can follow this discourse, you’re probably very good at crossword puzzles. I heard the train roaring by on Matt Gonzalez’s cell phone this morning. I’d phoned to get him to teach one class for Savannah Blackwell at SF State while she’s north and he called back from some God-forsaken train crossing in the desert in Southern California.
Off fund-raising to retire Ralph’s debt, I’d imagine. I don’t know. Sounded like they were having a whale of a time though. Matt and Bob Coleman. Dweebs in da desert. Newsom’s people are still obsessed with Gonzalez. They booked Gavin for an interview with the L.A. Times editorial board (largest Republican newspaper) when they found out Matt was touring the southland. When they found out Gonzo was teaching a class at the SF Art Institute, they scheduled a speech there for Gavin. Sad that they have no ideas of their own.
“I won’t stand for that tone!!”
(Ross Mirkarimi
Sometimes in the heat of battle. While well-oiled and stoned … watching Board hearings and the like … sometimes I phone my favorite supes and give them a tall ration of shit. I’d done this to D5’s new boss when he cut the sole speaker in the Public Comment section of the Rules meeting yesterday. The speaker was Francisco de Costa, who is effectively, a free aide to anyone on the Board with the brains to listen. Vice-chair, Mirkarimi noted that he respected and worked with de Costa and that the decision to keep public comment to 2 minutes wasn’t his idea but came from Michela Alioto-Pier.
“What about Murphy’s expose’?” … I’d pushed Ross to send a letter of inquiry to the City Attorney’s office asking if there was any substance to the seemingly, perfectly documented series the Sentinel chief has been running which purports that a conspiracy between RBA attorneys and the Assessor’s office handed a piece of valuable waterfront property to Joe O’Donoghue’s first lieutenant, Joe Cassidy. … With an assessment of less than 20% of actual value.
To me, this is a landmark case. When none of the major print sheets picked up the story, I could see it dying. To insure that doesn’t happen, any supe can send a one-line inquiry to the City Attorney asking if there is substance to charges in any news story. It is very common for supes to bellow and pontificate during their own ‘Roll Call for Introductions’ portions of the full Board meetings, requesting the City Attorney to investigate charges leveled in the media. In the 2 Board meetings since the story broke, no supe had made the request. I surmised they couldn’t be protecting Mabel Teng who is held in almost unanimous contempt. Are they afraid of Joe Cassidy and the RBA? We’ll see. … Again, great work from Patrick and his ace photographer, Luke Owens. And, I’m told the series isn’t complete.
The best political reporting in town has been online for quite some time now.
Heard around town
“It feels better to get knocked up than to get knocked down.”
(new RBA slogan)
“I just had my second orientation meeting.”
(Michael Moore)
“You’re becoming an Asian?”
(Jens Nielsen)
“Where is Officer Kupke when you need him?”
(Nielsen again)
“Long-term pot users wind up,
by and large,
as memory-impaired losers.”
(Matt Smith)
Whew! Lot of hoof-in-mouth disease this Spring. Sometimes it really does seem that SF Weekly’s Smith needs to have his own medication/s adjusted. Maybe he’s a manic-depressive? I mean, he goes from the highest level of investigative reporting, right on down to trying to pass his utterly bullshit personal prejudices (the popularity of pot is a “scourge”?) … trying to pass the shit as fact. … You should have taken Hellman’s bribe, Matt.
On Officer Kupke. Remember him? He was the beat cop who ruled the territory occupied by the ‘Sharks’ and the ‘Jets’. I was talking about the value of beat cops and Jens brought up the cop from Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story’. It was such an accurate analogy. Everyone listened to Kupke because they’d known him their entire lives. It wasn’t a San Francisco situation where the cops stay in their cars and rotate districts constantly. … I saw the first beat cops I’ve seen on foot in two weeks this morning. Neither had billy clubs which is a big mistake. The Tenderloin is a tough beat and a low tech option is essential. The two guys I saw could either use their hands or shoot you.
These guys really and truly have no idea how to walk a beat. There’s always 2 of them and they only talk to each other. They glare at anyone who dares establish eye contact. And, these guys I saw are among the rare ones who actually put leather to pavement. Which is my point.
Most of the cops around the City are NOT walking their beats as they’ve been instructed to do. Oh, a few, but not very many. I’m all over this town and they simply aren’t there. They don’t ride the buses each shift as they’re supposed to either. The fault for their failure to comply with the Chief’s orders falls to Deputy Chief Greg Suhr who is designated Chief of Patrol. If he can’t get the cops back on foot and back on the buses, he should resign or be demoted and transferred. The gap between precinct cops and their neighborhoods continues to broaden. It’s up to the cops to get out there and do their Officer Kupke impersonations.
“We need to rethink the Job Corps.”
(Sherry Williams, TI Citizens Advisory Board)
Treasure Island might as well be on another planet as far as the SF Board of Supervisors is concerned. The first use of these closed bases is mandated by federal law to be to use them to alleviate any local homeless problem. I’ve been pointing out for the past 5 years that there is plenty of barracks space on the old navy base to house all of the chronically homeless. Or, I should say, ‘was’. Developers pressed their flunky fronts to tear down most of the housing after I wrote my first couple of columns on the subject. I commented at the time that it was only a matter of time before the developers moved to dump the job corps. Well, they’ve fired the opening salvo.
Sadly, neither D10’s Sophie Maxwell nor D 1’s Jake McGoldrick seemed to be aware of the first priority legal use of the island. Further, they did not even to understand where the power that runs the island comes from. Lennar tool Michael Cohen couldn’t control a grin when McGoldrick asked if the island would be generating its own power.
They humored Jake when he asked about tidal power. No, you needed a deep trench to install the tidal modules and there was none next to the island. Fact is, that’s a simple lie. If we can generate power a couple of hundred miles away at Hetch-Hetchy and run it down here on power lines, we can certainly run lines from any of the 5 adequate trenches (one, less than a mile from TI) that dot the bay. I got that from Peter O’Donnel who headed the tidal energy project for the Department of the Environment. Fact is, we could generate some 10K megawatts of energy from tidal power from the trenches in our bay. The City has never used over 1.7k megawatts of power. What that means, science fans is that we could power the entire Bay area with tidal power and not rely upon natural gas lines running a couple of thousand miles from Texas.
Further, there is talk about the developer heavy Treasure Island bureaucracy handing the keys to the island’s substation over to PG&E when the navy finally departs. This, despite the fact that PG&E neither generates the power used there (we do) or built any of the power grid (the navy did it 70 years ago). Hopefully, the supes will bone up on the realities of the world’s most valuable landfill before TIDA & TI CAB and Cohen bring in their next wagon loads of horse shit power point presentations.
TIC solution
I just finished 5 days cat sitting old Jackson. He’s 12 and only child to Alexandra Jones who writes a companion column in the Bulldog. What a museum! Enormous shotgun apartment that a realtor would call a 4 bedroom but which Alexandra and Jackson use as an unblemished antique.
When she returned from her short vacation, Alexandra asked what happened with Dufty and Pier’s TIC legislation. That’s when I realized that I’d been staying in one unit of a 6 unit TIC.
I went over how the vote had gone (down) on allowing another 400 or so condo-conversions this year. She noted that the tough thing was the lottery. I asked, what if you simply went on a list like people who apply for Section 8 or for a Taxi decal? She liked the idea. … Sooo, that’s the solution. That way, you know how long you’ll wait (no more than 6 years with the present list) until your building is one of the 200 legally converted each year.
That’s enough for today. My computer is acting up. I’ve tossed water on enough hound dogs. I get to babysit my gorgeous granddaughter tonite. It’s 10 days to my birthday and my ‘impaired memory’ keeps going back to something Rachel said last month.
You and who else?
