It was a
great week to stay away from City Hall, and I did. But I couldn’t
resist cracking open a bottle of bargain wine & watching it all
on the tube. There were good reasons to hide at home. There was a
full moon, there were rolling blackouts, and it was Budget Analyst
Harvey Rose’s birthday. Harvey doesn’t take prisoners on his
birthday. Just ask Director of Planning Gerald Green. Here was the
scene.
Green and Controller Ed (rubber stamp) Harrington
brought over a wheelbarrow each of doo from the mayor’s office to
shove on through the May 9 meeting of the board’s Finance
Committee. There were special assistants positions, even one to be
appointed by the mayor to spy on the board — they called it “liaisoning”
or something like that. There were single-source contracts (boy,
does Harvey hate them). Hundreds of thousands of dollars for
consultants. And it all had to be done on that day or, Green
threatened, Planning just might not get around to some of the work
the public wanted till ...oh, say, late fall or maybe next year.
“Exigency” is the new buzzword coming out of
the mouths of all of the mayor’s people. It’s moved into third
place on Willie’s Top Ten Obfuscatory Terminology list. “Retroactivity”
continues to hold the top spot, followed by “caveat.” “Nexus”
was bumped to fourth place by the fast-moving “exigency.”
Harvey finally had enough. He had two things to
say. “First,” he said, “I want to thank you for wishing me a
happy birthday.” Then he told Gerald to tick just about every bit
of the legislation he’d brought over. It was an amazing
performance that was only heightened by Harvey’s necktie, which
looked as though it was cut from one of those bead seat covers
cabbies use. I bet it’s the only day of the year he gets to pick
out his own tie.
Unfortunately, Matt Gonzalez gets to pick his own
tie every day. I suspect that the Good Supervisor paints his ties,
then lays them in the driveway out front to iron them nice n’
flat. I’m also convinced Supervisor Gonzalez washes his shirts in
the bathroom sink across from his office. I swear, when Gonzalez
questioned Rose and the camera kept going back and forth, their ties
made my eyes water.
Other things the bad guys did… Sometimes the
audacity of Willie’s departments amazes even me. In Finance
yesterday, the Airport Commission sent a guy named Peter Nardoza to
inform the supervisors that he had let an entire airline move into a
huge section of the brand new terminal without paying a dime and
without a lease!! Not only that, he said that he didn’t want them
to have to pay anything until they got all settled and started to
make more money. They need the break because they’re a little
start-up company. They’re named United Airlines, Inc.
Hey, I’m in the business of taking care of
rental property. Sometimes for whatever reason, you go through the
process of evicting someone. The “nexus” of the poor slob’s
life comes when the Sheriff’s Department sends two deputies to
assist him onto the sidewalk. Imagine having to evict a whole
airline. “I’m sorry sir, but you don’t seem to have a legal
lease for this space.”
I guess if their pilots are really good and they
pick their spots carefully, they could all land on Highway 101 for a
while. That could solve the shortage-of-runways problem. But why
restrict them to 101? Surely, there’s enough space to set down a
747 in Golden Gate Park.
There’s
more. Like I said, it was a full moon. Supervisor Aaron Peskin
completed his plans for a huge garage where Sue Bierman’s pretty
little park was on Drumm, between Clay & Washington. In an
ordinance that looked strangely as though it had been written by
attorneys for a West Virginia Coal company, Peskin gave us a park
that will be about 6 inches deep, have a busy street running through
one end, be sandwiched by large light-rail stops, & sit atop a
rumbling, carbon monoxide–spewing 400-car garage. Aaron calls it,
eloquently, “excluding the subsurface thereof.” Hell, there’s
gonna be more traffic there than when the place was a freeway.
Other goodies… Anytime the mayor sends a piece
of legislation, look at it under a microscope and clip a clothespin
on your nose. Thus cometh: “Geographic Information System Data
License Fees.” Another way to describe this might be: “Permission
to permeate, radiate, and microwave the citizenry.” Like Mt. Sutro
and its hundred or more new antennas. There’s not likely to be a
rush of Environmental Impact Reviews asking such questions as, “Will
these antennas harm my unborn child?” Naw, Gerald Green will wave
away that problem with a “Negative Declaration” finding. As a
matter of fact, Public Works has been collecting fees for these
things for about three years already.
I recall reps for some of these antenna folks
calling on one of the buildings I managed. They offered over 2 grand
a month to allow them to put antennas on our roof. The owner turned
it down because he was afraid we’d get sued if the things turned
out to be dangerous. The city government, of course, has no such
reservations. There they stood with a pile of cash already
collected. When Supervisor Aaron Peskin (Planning’s point man on
the board) asked, “What up?” they increased the pot by $105,000.
The supes took the money and didn’t ask a single embarrassing
question.
That wasn’t all…The mayor blind-sided Finance
chair Mark Leno. Willie had acting Rec & Park director Elizabeth
Goldstein ask Leno to sponsor a resolution giving her total power
over the ticket kiosk on Union Square. As Leno put it: “You gave
me a no-problem pass through and it turned out to be much more.”
It got ugly there for a while. The good chairman even sided with
Matt Gonzalez and (despite Peskin’s desire to go along with
Planning) tabled a request for more troops. If the mayor and Mark
Leno develop a real rift, it could be good news for poor people,
people of color, and bottom-feeding journalists.
Complain to h.
brown
