SF Gov InAction: Everybody's Doing the Eric Mar Dance of Futility

Monday, Jan. 11

10:30 a.m. - City Operations and Neighborhood Services committee

There is so little going on at this meeting that physicists have yet to quantify an amount this small.

 
1 p.m. - Land use & Economic Development Committee

When local small business owners spend years complaining, the result is a meeting like this one. Four out of the six measures on the agenda are designed to help local and/or small local businesses get more contracts and money from the city. Why? Because we're San Francisco, damn it: We believe in putting local people first, and efficiency last.

Measures before this committee will allow "informal solicitation" for contracts, commodities and services of up to $100,000 - and "update" the city's ability to set contracts aside for local small businesses; raise the threshold for sealed competitively bid construction contracts from $100,000 to $400,000 (and many others adjustments like that); and increase the number of contracts specifically set aside for local businesses.

This way even really, really, terrible small businesses have a decent shot at a government contract. It's only fair.

Fortunately, we have an airtight system in place for making sure that all this extra leeway to steer city contracts to local businesses won't be used by politicians to reward their supporters. We ... we DO have a system in place like that, right?

Uh oh.

The other significant thing to happen at this meeting is a public hearing on the housing practices of Academy of Art University. These have been well documented by SF Weekly, and you can read about them in depth here, here, and here.

I like to think of Academy of Art's housing practices as a complicated dance with the city that contains the following steps:

1) Academy of Art obtains a building and illegally converts it to dorms or classrooms.
2) The City of San Francisco says "They should have applied for a permit to do that!"
3) Nothing happens.

I'm not sure if that resembles a mambo or a cha-cha, but it's been going on for decades. Supervisor Eric Mar has had the bright idea that maybe San Francisco should penalize Academy of Art for illegally taking housing stock off the market (for everyone but its students), and keep this from happening again.

Unfortunately, Mar is the Supervisor Who Doesn't Do Anything, so nothing has gotten done (see step 3). A public hearing qualifies as "nothing."

 
Tuesday, Jan 13, 2 p.m. - Full Board of Supervisors

Now that all of the supervisors will presumably show up (ahem), it's likely that all of the bills that were previously held back because they might not have had the votes to pass will actually be passed. These include the measure preventing owners who want to move into their property from doing so if it would evict tenants with children, and "Gavin's Law" (the bill requiring city office holders to reimburse the city for the cost of their security detail when campaigning out of town).

There will be a great deal of talk, and several bills, about the creation of San Francisco's Sustainable Financing Program -- the creation of a special tax district to finance energy efficiency and conservation improvements to private property. At this point, all of San Francisco is a series of giant overlapping special tax districts, but it kind of works. Granted, we wouldn't need it to work if the city were even routinely effective at setting simple policies and incentives -- but we work with the San Francisco we have, not the San Francisco we dream about.

We'll be incurring $150 million of bond debt for the Sustainable Financing district, by the way.

There will be a hearing over the city's intention to reclaim the subsidewalk basement encroachments needed for the proposed Central Subway. You don't even want to know how much that project's going to cost. Seriously: You'd get a headache.

Finally, the city will allocate $1.7 million for library improvements at the Bayview and Visitacion Valley Library locations. People like libraries, so I thought you'd want to know.

Wednesday, January 13, 11 a.m. - Budget and Finance Committee

Now that the Board of Supervisors has set up our Sustainable Financing special tax district, the budget committee will begin the arduous work of setting the tax rates. Because you can't have a tax district without tax rates -- that's crazy talk.

The other interesting crazy talk at this meeting will be about next year's city budget. It may be crazy, but it's all true: We're staring down the barrel of a $500 million deficit, and the Board of Supervisors is just beginning to craft its response.

There will also be a vote on a Memorandum Of Understanding (a contract agreement) between the city and the Sheriff's Deputies' union, and a vote on another $10 million in bonds for the Sustainable Financing district.

Kind of makes you wonder: Just how sustainable is all this financing?

Thursday, January 14, 1 p.m. - Government Audit & Oversight Committee

The city is also preparing to approve Memorandum's of Understanding with its firefighters. That is all.

Seriously, that's it: whole meeting, right there.