By Joe Eskenazi
Aaron Peskin doesn’t see the mayor’s grand plan to shoo cars from the Embarcadero for dance- and yoga-ins as set in stone quite yet. The North Beach supervisor instead describes it as “freshly laid concrete that hasn’t quite set.”
If that’s the metaphor of Peskin’s choosing, expect to see his footprints and signature in that concrete before it dries.
Peskin told SF Weekly he and Supervisor Sean Elsbernd plan to call for an economic impact study of the mayor’s proposed car-free Embarcadero parties during Wednesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. The festival days, scheduled for Sunday, Aug. 31 – just before Labor Day – and Sunday, Sept. 14, would entail shutting down six miles of road from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Peskin said the first he heard of the car-free party days was when “every business from the Ferry Building to Aquatic Park started howling” – and leaving messages on his voicemail. “Lining up dancing and yoga classes probably took a lot of organizing. They just didn’t talk with anyone whose livelihood was going to be affected.”
Motions to close the Embarcadero have traditionally elicited behavior in Fisherman’s Wharf-area merchants akin to Indiana Jones in a Vivarium. Earlier this decade ...
By John Geluardi
The newspaper guild has filed a complaint against the largest newspaper company in the Bay Area claiming that managers retaliated against pro-union employees by laying them off.
Just weeks after newsroom employees of the Bay Area News Group East Bay (BANG/EB), a cluster of MediaNews publications, voted to unionize, Publisher John Armstrong and Executive Editor Kevin Keane announced that 29 employees would be laid off due to declining revenues.
The Northern California Media Workers Guild does not dispute the financial need for the layoffs, but claims that specific workers were targeted including award winning social services reporter Sara Steffens (pictured), who was a leader in the union campaign.
