San Francisco News Blog

The tentative plan for the manzanita we're hearing from those involved in crafting it is to move the plant -- which may be 40 to 70 years old -- to a location where it could become part of a breeding population once again (while previously considered extinct in the wild, a number of Franciscan genotypes descended from clippings made in '47 reside in local botanical gardens). While, theoretically, the botanists and government officials crafting a quick turnaround conservation plant for the lone Franciscan Manzanita could order the billion-dollar highway rebuild to be drastically altered, it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

As a result, some have anticipated that the Center for Biological Diversity will file suit. But Jeff Miller, a local conservation advocate with the CBD, said that's not necessarily so.

© California Academy of Sciences

The Franciscan Manzanita

​The other day we reported on the apparent discovery of a Franciscan Manzanita in the Presidio -- the first wild specimen of the native San Franciscan plant spotted since 1947. But, in a development that appears to be ironic -- without any mention of diabetics being flattened by insulin trucks -- the manzanita is smackdab in the middle of the planned route for the billion-dollar Doyle Drive redesign. 

According to Al Donner, an assistant regional supervisor with the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, a consortium has been cobbled together to decide what comes next. Representatives from the Presidio Trust, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Fish and Wildlife, and expert botanists have a couple of weeks to bang out a conservation plan. Is it within the group's power to tell Caltrans to make costly and time-draining changes to the revamp of the state's most dangerous highway to save a single bush? Donner isn't sure -- but a member of the group told us it can. And yet, that group member also told SF Weekly that moving the roadway doesn't appear to be the route being taken with regards to saving the Franciscan Manzanita.

"The current location of the plant is a place where, even if you left it there, it's not really likely to become a functional population over time," said the group member, who insisted on speaking anonymously. "The goal should be the long-term persistence of the plant. Ideally, the recovery of the plant will involve essentially making it part of a population."

In short, many cuttings need to be taken of the bush and planted elsewhere, and an attempt needs to be made to replant the Franciscan Manzanita (this will be a risky maneuver). This is also the route favored by Professor Tom Parker of San Francisco State, one of the state's foremost experts on manzanitas. "I would rather see it moved to a place where it's protected better and plant more individuals next to it and basically start a population of them," he says. "There are a couple of different individuals in cultivation in botanic gardens. So it makes a lot more sense to me to restore a population into the wild rather than save a single individual in a place you can't really do that."

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The column asked: How could a toxic-waste dumper be stamped officially green? Isn't that taxpayer-funded greenwashing?

In response to our inquiry, (but after our deadline) Sushma Dhulipala Bhatia, who directs the city's Green Business program, kindly investigated the matter, and offered some insight into how a major toxic waste dumper might become an officially designated local green business.

The designation was based in part on the fact Sims didn't use toxic chemicals to clean up the San Francisco pier they where collect recyclables, and that the company made sure wastewater at that pier didn't spill into the bay, Dhulipala Bhatia reported.

To our minds, this is kind of like Typhoid Mary earning a health and safety award for washing her hands after going to the bathroom.

But we'll let Dhulipala Bhatia speak for herself. Here's the e-mail we received from her:

That grabbed some headlines. But work recently undertaken by San Francisco State's Professor Tom Parker may change the way scientists think about evolution. Parker -- one of the aforementioned experts called in to verify the Franciscan Manzanita -- asserts that one of the key factors in manzanita survival is ... rats.

While supervising his students' field studies on seed predation -- in plain English, seeds being eaten by rats and other rodents -- Parker noticed something interesting about manzanita growth patters in fire zones. Emerging from the charred earth, the young plants came up in clusters of 10, 20, or even 30 plants packed together in a small space. It occurred to the professor that an odd, symbiotic relationship might be going on: Rats may be burying manzanita seeds deep enough that they survive fires and form the next generation.

It's a nifty idea. But to prove it, you need to follow around some rats. So Parker did. 

© California Academy of Sciences

The incredibly rare Franciscan Manzanita

​A pair of the state's foremost experts in manzanita plants have weighed in that the bush recently uncovered during the Doyle Drive project is a living specimen of the Franciscan Manzanita -- a discovery akin to stumbling across a Dodo or Passenger Pigeon. The plant was last seen in the wild in 1947, when legendary local botanist James Roof ran in front of a platoon of bulldozers to grab a few samples of the bushes just before they were ripped from the ground as the former Laurel Hill Cemetery was converted into homes and buildings.

"It's a very big story," said a laughing Mike Vasey, a lecturer at San Francsico State called in by Presidio officials to examine the plant. Both Vasey and Professor Tom Parker believe the bush to be the genuine article. So they're excited. But two factors are mitigating their joy. First, they'll have to wait a month or two until the plant buds to do a chromosome count and determine it really is the Franciscan Manzanita. And, second, it's smackdab in the middle of where the highway is supposed to go.

"It's hard to say exactly what's going to happen," said Vasey. "My impression is that there's a good chance the individual may be relocated -- hopefully successfully -- and many cuttings will be taken so the genotype can be preserved."

Botanists are fortunate to have several different "bloodlines" of the Franciscan Manzanita -- the cuttings Roof ran in front of the bulldozers to obtain were successfully planted in the East Bay Regional Parks Botanical Garden, where their ancestors thrive still.

Roland and Belinda Hinmueller ​

​At the central Salvation Army kitchen in SoMa Wednesday morning, two line cooks wore cycling jerseys along with their hairnets. You could consider kitchen hands Roland and Belinda Hinmueller a type of extreme migrant worker: a New Zealand couple pedaling from Alaska to Argentina on their yellow tandem bicycle "Big Bird." The trip is a more eco-conscious and ambitious version of Che Guevara's motorcycle journey across the Americas as documented in The Motorcycle Diaries. Yet instead of working at an Amazonian medical clinic a la Comandante Che, the New Zealand couple is volunteering at Salvation Armies along the way.

The oddest thing of all is the duo isn't on an extreme reality show testing whether their marriage can withstand a pan-American trip on a tandem bicycle. (Whether they'll write a revolutionary's coming-of-age tome at the end of the trip is anyone's guess.) Nope, it seemed this was a sighting of that rare species of altruistic people who want to donate their time to a worthy cause -- the type of story that concludes the nightly news and restores your faith in humanity.

During Salvation Army stop No. 11 in San Francisco yesterday, the couple assembled 360 pot pies and delivered meals to seniors. Today they'll be talking to kids at a Salvation Army after-school program about their cycling adventures.

The promised land

​The city's Public Utilities Commission and Local Agency Formation Commission -- commonly known as LAFCo, the commission helps formulate energy policy -- yesterday issued a Request for Proposals from potential bidders who would run the program. Called CleanPowerSF, the initiative is a "community choice aggregation" plan that would allow the city to pool all its power customers together and offer them to a private supplier.

CleanPowerSF's purpose is to break up PG&E's monopoly on the city's power supply, ushering in more renewable and local sources of energy. (As such, it has the support of many "public power" advocates, who have supported past unsuccessful efforts to gain voter approval for a city takeover of PG&E's local power grid.) But the softened bid requirements -- in particular the loosening of the city's commitment to CleanPowerSF providing rates for customers at or below those of PG&E -- raise questions about where the effort is headed. In theory, the less stringent bid request could lead to a program that is less green, and more expensive for the city's ratepayers, than what CleanPowerSF proponents have promised.

DFG

Click on this map for a very large version

​For those who fish, either professionally or because it simply beats sittin' by the dock of the bay, wastin' time, we have some limited good news. The state's Department of Fish and Game -- with the input of the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment -- have re-opened the following areas in the wake of last month's Dubai Star oil spill.

• Oakland Middle Harbor north to the Bay Bridge
• Oakland Inner Harbor
• San Leandro Bay
• Shoreline south of the southern boundary of Oakland Airport
  to the San Mateo Bridge

That being said, you're still forbidden from harvesting the sea from Alameda County's shoreline ranging from Alameda Point to the southern boundary of Oakland airport. Incidentally, these bans don't apply to people fishing from boats. In that case, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment suggests -- and this is not a joke -- that anglers "avoid fishing in areas where there is a visible sheen on the water." You see? Someone had to go to college to give advice like that. Maybe even grad school. 

Meanwhile, several San Francisco fishermen and a seafood processor last week filed a $10 million class-action suit against the Dubai Star and its ownership. They must have seen the sheen.

An duck soaked with oil by the 2007 Cosco Busan spill

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The defendants "were negligent and spilled toxic diesel fuel and or bunker fuel into San Francisco Bay while taking on fuel," reads the complaint, which was filed in San Francisco federal court. "Defendants, their agents, operators, and managers are strictly liable to plaintiffs for all losses of income or property damage that are proximately caused by the wrongful conduct of defendant."

The $10 million sum is the class action suit's estimation of "loss of fishing profits and related fish-processing profits." 

If Senator Leland Yee has his way, this won't happen again. But not for that reason. Not that he's saying.

The San Francisco State Senator on Thursday announced plans to introduce legislation that would require Californians who desire a White Pages be delivered to their homes "opt in" with their phone service provider, rather than have it delivered whether they like it or not. State law currently requires phone providers to send a White Pages for every phone line in a home -- meaning those with multiple phone lines end up with two, three, four or more books.

"Is there any way you can use that many books," queried Yee. (High chair? Weights? Object to drop on noisy drunks outside window?) "A lot of these books are simply tossed out and never used whatsoever."

Oops, they did it again. Lennar, the company that drew activist hellfire for failing to control dust in Bayview during the early stages of its construction at the Hunters Point Shipyard, is now facing fines for similar dust violations in Arizona.

The company will have to pay the Environmental Protection Agency a $182,519 settlement for not removing particulate matter from vehicles and not immediately cleaning up dust tracked 50 feet beyond the residential construction sites in Maricopa County, the agency announced today.

More than $144,000 of the fee will go towards outfitting Phoenix's city-owned vehicles and equipment with particulate matter emission control devices. Dust can trigger asthma problems and irritate eyes, and even trigger premature death in people with heart and lung disease when breathed into the lungs, the agency says.

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While Cal-ISO -- the state body that determines how much power generation municipalities require -- seemed amenable to shutting down the plant's Unit 3 smokestack when the highly touted transbay power cable comes online early next year, it was not willing to pull the plug on Mirant outright. Citing a potential city shortage of 25 Megawatts, Cal-ISO was not yet ready to give assent to close Units 4, 5, and 6. The body pledged to complete an analysis within two months regarding whether it is viable to shutter those units.

The city has long held that decreased overall power demand would allow San Francisco to meet its power quotas without adding any additional generation. At the August press conference announcing the city's settlement with Mirant, Public Utilities Commission head Ed Harrington described that so-called 25 MW shortage as "overly cautious": That figure assumed "two major power transmission cables went down on the peak hour of the peak day and no one ever made any change in their behavior when it happened." 

SF Weekly obtained a copy of the consent decree between San Francisco and U.S. officials just after posting an item about an Oct. 27 EPA lawsuit charging San Francisco with environmental law violations in connection with the 2005 spill at a city bus yard.

In addition to the payment, the city has also agreed to train staff and install new safety equipment to avoid a recurrence of the fuel tank overflow incident that sent bus fuel into the Bay.

"There's been a laser-like focus on this issue," said Muni spokesman Judson True.

According to the Board's formal complaint, treated wastewater flows from the implicated plant in Pacifica through the Calera Creek Wetlands and into the ocean at Rockaway Beach (activities at Rockaway now include hiking, biking, and dodging excrement). The complaint alleges that last January the plant dumped 100,000 gallons of raw sewage after a system overflow, among other so-called "discharge events."

The city closed two affected beaches during the January spills, but the complaint alleges that sewage was also popping out of manholes in multiple locations in the area. The same week, the plant released 6.9 million gallons of partially treated wastewater into the wetlands when a glitch caused the filth to bypass important filtration processes. So far, this plant has already agreed to fork over $586,000 from previous liability complaints from the Board (one in 2005 and another in 2007) for similar problems.   

Around 100 cyclists donned snorkels and other water-themed costumes to show that a warming, rising sea would inundate downtown.

Protest coordinator Chris Carlsson explained which parts of downtown the bicyclists would traverse during their 15-minute ride. Along Market Street, through the Financial District, back along the Embarcadero to Justin Herman Plaza.

Joe Eskenazi

'That new composting bin smell...'

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Meanwhile, the filthy, bedraggled veteran green bins stood as stark reminders of what is to come for these new recruits. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, greenie. It tolls for thee.

In fact, the martial allegories are hard to dismiss. Now that San Francisco has, in essence, declared war on composting, a vast army of conscript green bins have been pressed into action alongside the longtime "volunteers." One imagines that the battle-scarred volunteers resent the new conscripts -- who, in addition to being shiny and clean, come equipped with newfangled reinforcements:

Joe Eskenazi

Wow! Kitchen bins!

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Fork over the money for the permit, water dude

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San Franciscans hoping to install such a system don't have to pay any state or city permitting fees -- for now. In August, the state loosened their regulations to facilitate greywater use by allowing the systems without permitting. The state ruling specified that local agencies may pass tighter constraints on greywater rules if they so choose. Looks like San Francisco might so choose.

San Francisco Plumbing Inspector Steven Panelli proposed that greywater systems should be inspected by city employees -- and called for the aforementioned permitting fees. The Building Inspection Commission punted on the matter today, leaving the door open for such fees to be implemented in the future.

No 10-cent reward for you, Unknown Comic

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Mirkarimi did not take to the hallways chanting "Si se pudo," but it was an important move nevertheless. The supervisor -- who was instrumental behind the city's internationally lauded plastic bag ban -- has said on numerous occasions that he does not consider paper grocery bags to be a panacea. Unfortunately, the city's laws do -- customers cannot tote away their groceries here in plastic bags, so they are automatically shunted to environmentally destructive, landfill-clogging paper. While Mirkarimi's stated goal has always been to get folks to start bringing their own bags, there's nothing but altruism to make you do so right now.

So by proposing that large grocery stores and chain pharmacies be mandated to put a dime in the pocket of anyone with a reusable bag, the city would finally take a step toward its stated goal. Unfortunately, however, it has chosen to do so in a way that continues to preach to the choir instead of seeking -- or forcing -- converts.

Read the legislation here:

bag_rebate_ordinance-00586014.DOC

Or else, kiddies!

​A few months back I wrote about how the harrowing experience of visiting "The Pit" -- the Hieronymus Bosch-like netherworld in which all of San Francisco's refuse ends up -- forced me into an illicit lifestyle. City studies have shown that roughly two-thirds of the crap at "The Pit" could be recycled or composted. And since my  building didn't offer composting, under cover of darkness I would furtively toss our compiled compost into someone else's green bin (I figured the chances of an indignant legit composter bellowing "Hey, save the world on your own, pal -- this green bin's mine!" were pretty low.).

In any event, all that ends tomorrow. The city's mandatory composting law goes into effect on Wednesday. Now I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life.

That being said, San Francisco's pending law does make me nervous: It notes in the fine print that no one living in a multi-unit building will be fined before July of 2011 because -- and this is key -- the director of the Department of the Environment has not yet figured out how to assess such fines. In short, we've enshrined this law without figuring out how to enforce it with regards to the largest portion of San Francisco's populace.

​People in fields such as petroleum, investment banking, or running chambers of commerce, know what it means to be blessed. They are embedded within industries that love to put on conventions and trade shows. Workers travel to distant cities, check into the Hyatt, mingle with people who went the same (or similar) college as they did, and, at the end of the day, hit industry-sponsored dinners and cocktails.

So it's easy to comprehend why the suits at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce have retained membership in the global warming-denying U.S. Chamber of Commerce, despite recent protest resignations by Apple Computer, PG&E, and Nike.

​The big news -- in print, on television, and here on the Internet -- is the one thing that even a deaf, illiterate caveman would realize if he bothered to poke his head out of his dwelling: It's raining. It's raining hard and people are getting wet. And if you take your dog out for a walk, it's getting wet, too.

But since this is the story du jour, we decided to go right to the source. Publicists tend to become very agreeable when you hold their heads down in the toilet bowl long enough, and, just like that, we had an exclusive sit-down with the storm that blew through San Francisco yesterday and rocked everyone's world.

We met the storm -- who goes by "Leonard, just Leonard" -- at The Tonga Room. The artificial rain falling from the ceiling that usually enhances the place's kitschy charm came over and enthusiastically shook Leonard's hand  -- "Man, I'd drench these bastards through and through if I could, if they let me -- but you ... you!" he moaned, staring up at Leonard like a Little-Leaguer in the presence of Derek Jeter.

Leonard magnanimously provided all the patrons with water -- whether they liked it or not. "Plenty more where that came from," Leonard blurted out. "Don't bother waiting to see the weatherman tonight. That's a fact, Jack."

SF Weekly: So, who were your influences?

Leonard: You know, as a gathering storm, you really have to choose role models that work for you. Lots of storms want to emulate the 1900 Galveston hurricane or the Great Lakes Storm of 1913 -- the big ones. You know, Hugo, Andrew, Katrina of course.

For a while, I admit I was really blatantly ripping off Hurricane Agnes. It's not something I'm proud of, but those were my formative days as a storm and I really hadn't found myself yet. So the notion of flooding a capital city to the point that the governor and his family run like hell and being declared the worst disaster in the history of the state of Pennsylvania -- and, hell, this is a state where subterranean coal fires can burn for damn near a century!  -- that was very intoxicating to me.   

Spencer Tunick

Didn't happen

​George Davis -- a former mayoral candidate known around the city as naked yoga guy --had pretty high ambitions for the second-annual Naked Olympics. Scheduled for Saturday, the competition was supposed to include barefoot races, ancient Greek and sumo wrestling, discus, broad jump, volleyball, touch football, and a kickboxing exhibition.

But the overcast, 50-degree Saturday didn't much appeal to the nudist crowd. When the games were supposed to begin, only eight stripped-down, goosebumpy guys had arrived. Among them was Rocky Angel, a beefcake who painted his face to look like a Mexican wrestler mask. But there was nobody to challenge him.

So instead of moving forward with a half-assed event, the host called it off.

Windmills aren't the only things spinning

​The gears of the Ministry of Correct Progressive Thought could be seen clanking into action once again this week on the editorial pages of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where that newspaper's opinion purveyors tried to convince readers that San Francisco should be pushing ahead full-bore with a public power scheme known as community choice aggregation, or CCA.

The argument in itself is a fair one. CCA, known in its local iteration as CleanPowerSF, would advance some widely held local energy priorities, such as greener power, while making the city less reliant on PG&E -- which for a century has held San Francisco in the vise-grip of an electricity monopoly. Yet once again, the Guardian has chosen to play its readers false when it comes to the hard facts on CCA and public power.

The big lie in this week's editorial concerns the cost of CleanPowerSF. Most reasonable people would expect that electricity from cleaner and more local sources would come at a premium, and independent analysts have concluded that this will certainly be the case with CCA. As we explained in a January cover story, the city controller's office estimates that CCA would drive up city residents' power bills by 24 percent -- and predicts that this burden would fall disproportionately on the city's poorest residents.

Andy Wright

Wayne Fenton and Breadstick

​As documented in this week's SF Weekly cover story, Too Cute to Shoot, a former army tank commander named Wayne Fenton recently spent $400 and a whole lot of time and energy rescuing a one-eyed, starving sea lion named Breadstick. (Meanwhile, as the story explains, there's a full-fledged sea lion infestation going on in San Francisco Bay and elsewhere up and down the West Coast).

Anyhow, Breadstick, who had been shot in the eye, washed up in Monterey Bay where Fenton and his visiting German wife found the creature. They eventually helped load the runty yearling into a rescue kennel, which a volunteer then transported to the Marine Mammal Center's hospital in Sausalito. There, Breadstick underwent eye removal surgery and feasted on fish smoothies until she was healthy enough to be released back into the wild.

G.B. Trudeau

​ As those of you who actually need those 15 minute breaks during the working day know, today is Day One of San Francisco's new, 20-cent fee on cigarettes to ostensibly fund butt-cleaning street-sweepers.

We've already written plenty about how the methodology behind this fee was ridiculous, leaves the door open to fees on virtually any product imaginable, and is basically just a new way to generate revenue from a class of city dweller -- smokers -- without any pull.

But will it lead to disgruntled smokers figuring they're funding the disposal of butts anyway -- so why not litter? One of the nation's foremost experts on littering says it just might.

A brochure for CleanPowerSF

​A planned overhaul of San Francisco's power grid intended to boost the city's energy independence and use of green electricity sources appears to be headed for trouble. Speaking to city officials on Friday, Mike Campbell, director of the CleanPowerSF program, said he thinks the ambitious plan's goals need to be more modest -- or they may not be achieved at all.

Current plans for CleanPowerSF -- also known as "community choice aggregation," or CCA, the program is supposed to allow the city to find a third party to provide energy as an alternative to the PG&E monopoly -- call for 51 percent of the city's energy to eventually come from renewable sources at rates at or below PG&E's, and for a significant portion of that power to be generated locally.

But Campbell expressed doubt that the city could find any companies willing to tackle such aggressive goals. "Based on my professional judgment," he said, "I believe that it's unlikely we'll be able to find a single bidder that will be able to meet all those criteria."

But can Rover end global warming?

​In the debate over what to do about global warming, almost nobody has a coherent position on the issue -- leftist greenheads hate market-based solutions even though they work. Right-wing Luddites profess the climate change problem doesn't even exist.

Could this dissonance become strong enough to provoke a polar magnetic field shift in earthly politics, in which right-wingers end up taking the lead proffering effective solutions to the climate-change problem? Recently statements by a deep-red Southern California politician suggest such a cosmic shift may be in the making.

San Francisco is in the process of rolling out a pilot program called SFPark, in which parking in a congested area at a busy time of the day would cost more than parking later in the afternoon far from downtown. Parking will be priced according to supply and demand, in other words.

​Nearly two decades after Diane Sawyer busted the Food Lion grocery store chain for selling rotting meat to customers, the company still seems obsessed with saving money on refrigeration,  according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In 1992, ABC's Primetime Live reported that Food Lion workers soaked rotten fish in baking soda, re-wrapped old chicken in barbecue sauce, and sold rat-gnawed cheese alongside rotting meat. The company sued -- not for libel, but on the theory that Sawyer's producers committed fraud when they signed up as Food Lion employees and hid cameras in their wigs. Food Lion's legal strategy threatened to set back American press freedom to a new pre-Constitutional era, where reporters seeking to going undercover to expose, say, abuse of mentally-ill patients, could potentially be punished for fraud.

A $5.5 million punitive verdict was eventually thrown out in federal appeals court, but not before undercover investigative reporting became largely passe in the nervous-nellie U.S. news business.

Fast-forwarding to the present, and the chain seems to still be determined to make every penny count when it comes to refrigerating food. According to the publication Biotech Business Week, the EPA earlier this month awarded Food Lion its Distinguished Partner Award at the Food Marketing Institute's Sustainability Summit in San Francisco. Food Lion was lionized for "deploying advanced refrigeration technology at new stores," the Biotech Business Week reported.

Gentlemen, start your engines...

​ Airfare from SFO to Munich to attend the Tesla Motors store grand opening there: $914 round-trip.

Reported base price for the Bay Area company's 2010 model Roadster: $109,000.

Filling up on organic German Beer purportedly served at the grand opening, then driving around Munich in a silent, high-powered car that provides no audible warning to people you're about to run down: Priceless.

​Last week, as a San Francisco Whale Tours boat cruised into the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, a humpback whale surfaced in the distance. Then a spout of water, presumably from its blow hole, shot high into the air.

Wynne and Perry Moore, a tourist couple from Dallas on board, found this pretty great and whipped out their cameras. At that point, they had no idea that their vessel, a 65-foot catamaran, was surrounded by about 50 massive sea beasts.
 
​As the captain reduced the Kitty Kat's speed and shifted into neutral, passengers began to notice black backs rising on either side of their boat, and what looked like geysers shooting up in every direction. Some of the whales began lunging at surface, mouths agape. Others were rolling around, showing off their pectoral flippers.

"You couldn't look anywhere and not see whales," said Wynne Moore. When whales began coming in closer to the boat, she could smell their rotten fish breath. Then captain informed everyone that whales were also swimming beneath them. We're about to be whale food, Wynne Moore thought to herself.