Author: admin

By Joe Eskenazi : 48hills – excerpt

PUC allowed contractors to renege on pledged community donations — pledges that had played a role in their winning of contracts

An audit released today by the Controller’s office reveals that the PUC’s Community Benefits Program is both deeply problematic and deeply mismanaged. In multiple contracts reviewed during the audit, the PUC allowed contractors to fail to completely deliver their promised — and binding —commitments to donate funds to the communities affected by PUC projects.

This is doubly disturbing, as the strength of a bidder’s pledged commitment to the community is a major factor in deciding who wins a lucrative contract from the PUC. Today’s audit revealed at least one situation in which the strength of a contractor’s commitment to fund the community allowed it to beat out a competitor that submitted a less generous offer — but the winning contractor subsequently reneged on the commitment that earned it the job.

“By awarding contracts based, in part, on Social Impact Partnership commitments and allowing contractors to default on those commitments, SFPUC increases the risk that it will award contracts to contractors that ultimately will not deliver the greatest value to the City or its residents,” sums up the audit…(more)

I can think of a few questions for the new director of the SFPUC and the City Attorney. Like, what does it take for a contractor to be put on a black list and what does it take to fire an incompetent and or crooked city employee?

By J. K. Dineen : sfchronicle – excerpt

A seven-story affordable housing complex in San Francisco’s Sunset District will be allowed to go forward despite a neighborhood association’s lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order that would have suspended pre-development work on the project.

On Wednesday San Francisco Superior Court Judge Charles Haines denied a request for injunctive relief that was filed by attorneys for the Mid-Sunset Neighborhood Association, according to court records.

The west side neighborhood group had filed a lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp.’s project at 2550 Irving St. represented a breach of contract, negligence and breach of “implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing.”…(more)

This deal will cost the folks who are pushing it a lot of votes next time they run for office. The entire west side of the city is battling two major issues with City Hall. The forced development of projects they hate and the closure of major streets in the neighborhood that filters the traffic from Marin and San Mateo into arrow neighborhood streets. The battle lines are being drawn and the results of the clash could put an end to the current regime. No amount of lipstick or press briefings can hide the pig under the mask.

By Glenn Rogers : westsideobserver – excerpt

ecently, in the November issue of the Westside Observer, there was an article, Plan to Protect Neighborhoods from Fire Abandoned, describing San Francisco as unprepared for another earthquake and fire. The source of the information was a former official who retired 10 years ago. That report did not take into account numerous improvements in technology and planning. The public should be aware of these advances. Graciously, on January 31, 2018, the SF Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and the SF Fire Department (SFFD), both agreed to discuss the article. At the meeting was the Assistant Deputy Chief Anthony Rivera. and John Scarpulla from the SFPUC. Fortunately, a great deal of progress has occurred in the last ten years…

CONGENIALITY: SFFD AND SFPUC:

Instead of these two agencies being at odds with each other, I found just the opposite. They explained that the SFPUC has countless water engineers and plumbers, while the SFFD does not. Furthermore, the SFPUC explained that they listen carefully to any request from the SFFD, since the SFPUC never fought a fire. This congeniality was sincere and heartfelt as these two agencies worked together to describe a plan they developed to fight fire in San Francisco…(more)

By Kathleen Ronayne : pressdemocrat – excerpt

SACRAMENTO — California water agencies that serve 27 million residents and 750,000 acres of farmland won’t get any of the water they’ve requested from the state heading into 2022 other than what’s needed for critical health and safety, state officials announced Wednesday.

It’s the earliest date the Department of Water Resources has issued a 0% water allocation, a milestone that reflects the dire conditions in California as drought continues to grip the nation’s most populous state and reservoirs sit at historically low levels. State water officials said mandatory water restrictions could be coming.

“If conditions continue to be this dry, we will see mandatory cutbacks,” Karla Nemeth, director of DWR, told reporters…(more)

How can California continue to grow the population during a major drought when we can’t support the people and crops we have now?

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

The Board of Supes, by a veto-proof majority, approved a measure today to allocate $64 million to fund social housing.

Only Sups. Catherine Stefani, Myrna Melgar, and Ahsha Safai dissented.

The vote does more than set aside money to take vulnerable properties off the speculative market. It sends a clear message to the Mayor’s Office that the supervisors are close to unanimous in their position that money from Proposition I should be allocated to housing…(more)

By Jaxon Van Derbeken : msn – excerpt (NBC video link on youtube )

The Millennium Tower may be the most recognizable sinking building in the city, but one researcher says earth-based and space-based observations confirm the entire downtown area around it is sinking as well.

“I looked at every building in the Bay Area, so just under a million buildings,” said U.S Geological Survey research geophysicist Tom Parsons, who estimates that over the last century, 3.5 trillion pounds of development and human activity – including the subsidence tied to loss of groundwater — have led to an estimated settlement of three inches across the entire Bay Area.

“Clearly, the most density and the tallest buildings are centered in that downtown San Francisco area, and that’s where we see the most calculated cumulative settlement from all of those buildings together,” he said.

Turns out that at an estimated 686 million pounds, the Millennium Tower is the third heaviest building in the city. The top nine all weigh more than 300-million pounds, but the only one that’s leaning significantly is the Millennium. Groundwater loss from adjacent construction has been blamed for the problem by the tower’s developers, while geotechnical experts say the key is that its foundation is not rooted in bedrock…(more)

Too bad CEQA environmental reviews do not include a report on the foundations and that our local ordinances do not require that engineers who design foundations communicate with engineers who design the buildings they rest upon. Perhaps this is something our city authorities should consider doing as they build denser, higher and heavier buildings. The cumulative effects of the loss of ground water should concern them as well. Who among our city representatives will take it upon themselves to fix the problem in our seismically challenged city?

By Ida Kukura :sfist – excerpt

Image: WeDrawTheLinesCA.org

One of the many quirks of the proposed SF state assembly district boundaries is that if David Campos won his assembly race, he would not even live in the district he represents.

The completion of the 2020 U.S. Census sets off another bureaucratic process for 2021, that is, redrawing districts for Congress, for the state Senate, the state Assembly, and even the SF Board of Supervisors districts. In most states, these redistricting processes are handled by legislators in a raw political grab to entrench more partisan incumbents. In California, which effectively lacks a functioning Republican party, the redistricting is handled by a citizen committee called the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. And among their goals this year is to give the state’s growing Asian population more legislative power.

They released their first draft of the districts Wednesday. Under the proposed new boundaries, Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district would take up more of San Francisco, adding the southwest neighborhoods like Lake Merced. Scott Wiener’s state senate district would expand to cover a little more of South San Francisco. These are not huge overhauls. But the proposed new state Assembly districts are drawing criticism, as the Chronicle reports on complaints that they “create a white-majority district on the east side,” and “dilute the influence of Asian American, Latino, African American and LGBTQ residents.”…

“I think this map pisses everybody off a little bit,” longtime City Hall political consultant David Ho told the Chronicle. “This iteration is just straight-up offensive. I don’t see any group that would support this iteration locally.”…(more)