San Francisco News Blog

The commission will come to order

​The applicants for a recently vacated seat on the city's Entertainment Commission -- a seven-member board of political appointees that regulates San Francisco nightclubs -- appear poised to once again stoke the debate over whether the commission is too cozy with the businesses it oversees.

The Board of Supervisors' Rules Committee will review the three applications at an upcoming meeting on Thursday. The Entertainment Commission's open seat is supposed to be dedicated to a representative from the public-health sector. As we reported in a July cover story, the board's composition had grown extremely lopsided in recent years, with five of the seven seats held by appointees with direct financial ties to the entertainment industry.

One of the applicants will likely face questions about whether he would perpetuate that status quo. David Lupo states in his application that he currently works as a bartender at the North Beach restaurant Sodini's, adding that he has "performed, musically, in many of San Francisco's clubs, bars, cafes, festivals, and street-fairs," over the past two decades.

By contrast, the other two candidates -- Neal Cavellini and Michael Kim -- do not disclose any ties to the city's nightlife in their application materials. Cavellini is a lieutenant in the San Francisco Fire Department, and Kim is marketing manager at the online video game company Zynga.

The Entertainment Commission has two seats set aside for industry representatives, but other seats have also come under the control of commissioners with industry ties. (The commission's president and urban-planning representative, Justin Roja, is co-owner of the nightclub 330 Ritch.) These ties have been cited by the commission's critics, who say that oversight of San Francisco's increasingly violent nightclubs has grown too lax.

The decision on the empty public-health seat could be a test case on whether city officials plan to get serious about diminishing undue industry influence on the Entertainment Commission. "It seems like it's a good idea to regulate applicants for non-industry seats to make sure they're actually non-industry," says one City Hall insider.

Photo   |   *saxon*