But proximity to Willie has proved a disappointing experience. The truth of the matter: Willie Brown is crude and tiresome, largely devoid of charm and wit -- as David Brinkley might say, our mayor's a bore. He's a spendthrift huckster, to boot.
It gives us no pleasure to say this. We do so only to illustrate how routinely this city is lied to regarding its politics. San Francisco's addiction to hagiography becomes a special liability near election time, when the city's newspapers endorse, and political lying goes to nauseating extremes.
This city is famous for ax-grinding, tin-pot publishers who torture the truth for their own petty agendas and delusions of grandeur. Clip their endorsement sheets and carry them into the polls and you have unwittingly become the soldier in a campaign not of your making. You may be helping out a guy named Kopp or Burton or Brown, or some abhorrent political consultant whose only interest is folding money.
The Grid, on the other hand, is pure and clean. The Grid will never lie. The Grid won't bore you with candidates and ballot issues it finds dull. The Grid is a theoretical construct, a disembodied column incapable of venality. If the Grid endorses, you must believe. So repeat after us: We shall vote the Grid ticket! We shall ...
In May, Tara Shioya, a staff writer for SF Weekly, wanted to look at a report that summarized an investigation the city attorney's staff had made into allegations of overtime irregularities at the San Francisco Fire Department.
Shioya was not asking for a classified CIA briefing.
The report she wanted to see dealt with allegations of improper, perhaps illegal behavior by city employees. And the allegations were more than 2 1/2 years old.
When Shioya asked for the report, the City Attorney's Office could not possibly have thought that releasing it would impede an investigation; the city attorney's probe was long since complete.
At the time of Shioya's request, no one was suing the city over the report, or the investigation that spawned it.
In fact, Shioya's request, made under the state's public records law, was of the type that public attorneys routinely grant hundreds or even thousands of times each year across the country, not only because freedom of information laws require that such documents be released, but also because disclosure of the results of official investigation serves the public interest.
Without blinking an eye, though, City Attorney Louise Renne found a reason to sit on the report.
Renne said the report must be kept secret as a matter of "attorney-client privilege." Renne's was a specious legal argument. It's the argument Hillary Clinton used while trying to keep notes of her Whitewater meetings with White House lawyers secret. It's the argument the Supreme Court has rejected as absurd.
It's the argument that the officials at the Fire Department are Renne's clients, and ordinary citizens are not.
But Shioya was on a deadline, and litigation would have been time-consuming and expensive. So the report remained Renne's captive.
Without benefit of the report, Shioya wrote her story, part of which involved significant abuse of over-time at the Fire Depart-ment. It was a good story that spurred some immediate follow-up in the dailies.
Last week, some four months later, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the overtime problems at the Fire Department continue. The department, it seems, had spent its entire annual overtime budget -- something like $2.2 million -- in the first quarter of this fiscal year.
We applaud the Chronicle for continuing to follow the issue.
We wonder why Renne wants to smother that issue. We wonder why Renne is still sitting on a document that might help explain a long-running overtime fiasco that (the Chronicle reported) "surprised" the Board of Supervisors. We wonder why Renne does not hold a press conference to publicize her office's investigative report and the serious overtime irregularities at the Fire Department.
We wonder why anybody would vote to re-elect Louise Renne.
Renne has perverted the office of city attorney. In a variety of matters that include, but extend far beyond, public records law, she has repeatedly represented the specific, selfish interests of the officials and departments of city government over the general interests of the citizens who elect her.
So we have the dilemma: Louise Renne is a spineless disaster as city attorney. And Louise Renne is running unopposed for re-election next week.
The solution? Write in a vote for Moe, Larry, or Curley. If we're going to have a stooge for city attorney, let's at least get some laughs out of it.
The stakes:
The city treasurer invests all city funds in the hopes of making money for municipal government, oversees the collection of taxes, and participates in the issuance of municipal debt.
The choices:
Lucrecia Bermudez, a nonprofit denizen with hardly enough experience to balance a checkbook, who, for some reason, thinks being a lesbian and of Latin ethnicity are the first qualifications for the treasurer's post that she should list in the official ballot book. Bermœdez is a creature of the quasi-Marxist weirdos at San Francisco Frontlines newspaper; if it were possible, she would probably invest all the city's money in North Korean government bonds.
Joel Ventresca, a dull and pedantic perennial candidate -- Supervisor 1990, Mayor 1995 -- who has greatly exaggerated his extremely limited resume and plays the pawn for that investment genius, San Francisco Bay Guardian Publisher Bruce B. Brugmann.
Susan Leal, a levelheaded, intelligent, and relatively independent thinker who has served with distinction on the Board of Supervisors, founded a health care management firm with 1,500 employees, worked as a congressional fraud investigator, and made a killing on the stock market with her personal portfolio.
Call us crazy, but we'd feel a little safer if Leal were treasurer.
The only propositions we give a damn about:
A and B: A $700 million debt package aimed at repairing and improving our water delivery and treatment facilities. This is a no-brainer. The work needs to be done. If it isn't done and a fire or earthquake hits, the water supply to the Fire Department might be cut off. And if the treatment facility (Prop. B) isn't fixed, our water could carry the Cryptosporidium pathogens that are so dangerous to people with compromised immune systems. As critics note, the city has played funny-money games with water revenues over past decades. That doesn't mean we should ignore a crumbling water system now.
E: This measure would transform the city's Youth Commission from an advisory group into a governmental body with some power over youth programs, and some ability to obtain government funds. One, ahem, minor problem with this proposal: The "people" on the commission can be as young as 12 years old. We like kids, but think government should be run by adults.
F: The cross in the city park on Mount Davidson has been the center of needlessly histrionic and litigious controversy for more years than we care to remember. (You know, that little church vs. state problem.) Now, we've got a bunch of aggrieved Turks chewing their foreheads, afraid that if the cross is sold to a private Armenian group, the Armenians will use it as a memorial for countrymen who were massacred in the early part of the century when the Ottoman empire suppressed an uprising.
The Grid is compelled to utilize its shut-up-and-sit-down option. Everyone should sit down and shut up. Prop. F should be approved, so a private group can buy the cross and the small piece of ground it sits on, so a piece of San Francisco history is preserved, and so Dirty Harry can sleep well at night.
H: Here's one of those tough choices. Prop. H would have the city patch up and keep an outdated, seismically unsafe freeway to help a bunch of politicos in the Sunset build a power base with the phony argument that changing the Central Freeway will destroy their businesses and that anyone who opposes this proposition is anti-Asian. Prop. H will end the economic rebirth of Hayes Valley -- now free of the overpasses of the Central Freeway -- even though this quaint neighborhood is one of the remaining few where Starbucks and the Gap haven't erased all sense of community and identity. And Prop. H will make it possible to build all sorts of neighborhood-destroying freeways north of Fell Street.
You can vote for Prop. H and accomplish all of the above.
Or, you can allow the earthquake-damaged freeway to be torn down and watch as federal and state money builds a modern, seismically sound structure that meets modern traffic needs and doesn't forestall economic development.
Guess which way the Grid commands you vote. Go on. Guess.
George Cothran (gcothran@SFWEEKLY.COM) AND JOHN MECKLIN (JMECKLIN@SFWEEKLY.COM) WELCOME TIPS, SUGGESTIONS, INNUENDO, AND COMPLAINTS. THEY CAN BE REACHED AT SF WEEKLY, ATTN: The Grid, 185 Berry, Lobby 4, Suite 3800, San Francisco,
