Category: News

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She Noticed $200 Million Missing, Then She Was Fired

By Scott Morris, Bay City News Foundation : propublica – excerpt

Alice Stebbins was hired to fix the finances of California’s powerful utility regulator. She was fired after finding $200 million for the state’s deaf, blind and poor residents was missing…

Earlier this year, the governing board of one of California’s most powerful regulatory agencies unleashed troubling accusations against its top employee.

Commissioners with the California Public Utilities Commission, or CPUC, accused Executive Director Alice Stebbins of violating state personnel rules by hiring former colleagues without proper qualifications. They said the agency chief misled the public by asserting that as much as $200 million was missing from accounts intended to fund programs for the state’s blind, deaf and poor. At a hearing in August, Commission President Marybel Batjer said that Stebbins had discredited the CPUC.

“You took a series of actions over the course of several years that calls into question your integrity,” Batjer told Stebbins, who joined the agency in 2018. Those actions, she said, “cause us to have to consider whether you can continue to serve as the leader of this agency.”…(more)

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Clint Reilly, S.F. Examiner’s New Owner, Vows to Expand Paper’s Newsroom, Coverage

By Laura Wenus : sfpublicpress – excerpt (includes audio)

The soon-to-be owner of the San Francisco Examiner intends to grow the publication’s newsroom and expand its coverage, diversifying the perspectives in San Francisco’s news ecosystem.

Clint Reilly, a retired political consultant with a real estate and hospitality business who also owns two local magazines, is purchasing the Examiner and SF Weekly after the two papers were under absentee ownership for years. The company he and his wife Janet co-own, Clint Reilly Communications, is expected to take over in January.

“What’s happened in newspapers over the last decade, decade and a half, even 20 years, has been essentially a huge cutback in journalists and costs at the local level,” Reilly said. “As journalists have been laid off, so have the beats that they cover. And so the amount of coverage of local news has declined dramatically over the last 10 years.”… (more)

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Hypocrisy in the local zoning debate

By Zelda Bronstein : 48hills – excerpt

Professors who argue that local regulations drive up housing prices appear to admit they have no credible data to back up that argument.

On December 1, 48hills ran my story about the California State Auditor’s dubious sortie against local land use authority, an incursion purportedly undertaken in behalf of greater housing affordability. While I’m waiting for the Auditor to respond to my Public Records Act request for documentation of her numerous claims, I want to call out the hypocrisy of three of the scholars cited in my story.

To illustrate the tenuousness of the Auditor’s attack, I observed that a growing number of academics are questioning the argument that “local constraints significantly hamper the provision of affordable housing.” I illustrated that interrogation with a few examples:…(more)

Government confusion, fraud and corruption are to blame for the high cost of building in San Francisco.

If we look at San Francisco’s building triumvirate, Planning, DBI and Permitting departments, that the public and small contractors must wade through we can see that the primary costs for building and remodeling in the city is not in government regulations. It is in government confusion, fraud and corruption. The sad thing is that is took the FBI t expose what many knew was going on for decades. This system is rigged. You must pay to play or get out of the game.

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Mill Valley’s RHNA Methology Letter Calls for a Stronger Response

By Susan Kirsch of Mill Valley : marinpost – excerpt

This letter is written to the Mill Valley Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City Councilmembers, but it may apply to any of our local civic leaders who are considering how to deal with the RHNA number conundrum, made more obviously out of touch with reality by the large exodus of citizens from California this year.

The end of the land rush has come to the state, due to a number of factors, but, our government officials can’t get past their old methods of creating financing through growth. Read the letter here and consider how you may apply the information to your community…(more)

Review the investigative report by The Embarcadero Institute, entitled “Double Counting in the Latest Housing Needs Assessment” (September 2020)…

“Use of an incorrect vacancy rate and double counting, inspired by SB-828, caused the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) to exaggerate by more than 900,000 the units needed in SoCal, the Bay Area and the Sacramento area.”

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SF challenges PG&E’s power moves

By Joshua Sabatini : sfexaminer – excerpt

Utility uses expensive hookups to discourage public power use\

The contentious relationship between PG&E and San Francisco has grown more tense, with the energy company now seeking to impose costly new requirements for The City to use its grid to deliver publicly-owned Hetch Hetchy power to city projects and even street lights.

The City lost a dispute earlier this year before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over similar requirements the utility imposed in recent years on projects like schools, affordable housing and pools. The City has since taken the matter to court.

But now PG&E has filed a Sept 15 proposal with FERC to make the costly hookups a requirement going forward as part of the wholesale distribution tariff, a set of rules for how the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission can use PG&E’s grid to serve The City’s own power customers. The SFPUC delivers over the grid greenhouse gas-free hydroelectric power produced by Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite…

PG&E has said it will now no longer offer the less expensive secondary service hookups but will support existing secondary service as long as there are no upgrades…(more)

 

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Misusing taxpayer dollars for campaigns

By Dan Walters : calmatters – excerpt

California’s local officials routinely use taxpayer dollars for ballot measure campaigns, even though it’s illegal. One agency just got fined.

Four of the 12 measures on California’s November ballot were placed there by the Legislature.

Let’s assume that legislators had also appropriated $100 million in taxpayers’ money for campaigns to persuade voters to approve the four. It would have been an outrageous and likely illegal misappropriation of public funds under several laws…

The only agency that even expresses interest is the state Fair Political Practices Commission, because anyone who spends money on political campaigns is supposed to file reports on their activities.

Occasionally, the FPPC has penalized miscreant local agencies, the latest being Los Angeles County, which in 2017 spent a million dollars for an ill-disguised campaign to pass Measure H, a quarter-cent increase in the sales tax..

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association complained about the use of public funds, but as usual, the county’s district attorney refused to investigate. The organization filed a lawsuit and complained to the FPPC.

Last week, it was announced that county officials had agreed to a settlement — without admitting liability — and a $1.35 million penalty...

Using public funds to pass ballot measures is also illegal at the local level. Government Code Section 54964,..(more)

In San Francisco we have the FBI investigating various illegal uses of public employees time and public funds being funneled through community benefits programs  and non-profits. It turns out the community that is benefiting from these programs is a very elite community comprised of  friends of the City Family that doles out the contracts to a limited few supporters of the City Family program.

It took the FBI years of investigating to bring charges on actions that city authorities turned a blind eye to for decades. The best we can do is recommend some reading of the Marina Times articles that are covering the minute details of the cases as they unfold, starting with “Friends with Community Benefits“, by Susan Dyer Reynolds.

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U.S. attorney hits SFPUC with subpoena as SF City Hall corruption investigation widens

By Dominic Fracassa : sfchronicle – excerpt

Federal officials served the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission with a sweeping subpoena last month, demanding numerous records and documents that appear to draw the agency into the widening City Hall corruption scandal touched off by the arrest of former Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru in January.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office issued the subpoena on June 15, according to a copy obtained by The Chronicle on Friday.

The subpoena suggests that federal investigators are interested in examining contracts the commission awarded to several companies, some of which have previously been linked to alleged schemes traced back to Nuru in investigations by the FBI and the City Attorney’s Office…

The federal subpoena specifically demands all communications “related to any LED light installation contracts” between commission employees and Walter Wong, Washington Wong, the relative with the business registration, and their affiliated companies. The City Attorney’s Office previously filed a subpoena directly to Alternate Choice in February…

They also ordered the agency to produce any commission audits from 2010 to the present related to trips taken by Kelly and Ellis…

Kelly’s wife is City Administrator Naomi Kelly, Nuru’s former boss…(more)

This is getting to be a rather extensive list of City Hall power players. Who will turn up next in the net?

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Jane Morrison, lifelong activist, dies at 100

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

She was an urban environmentalist before anybody knew what that meant — and a hero and mentor to many.

Jane Morrison, who was an urban environmentalist before anyone knew what that meant and a central part of the progressive movement in this city for more than half a century, has died at 100.

I got the news from John King at the Chron, who sent me an email asking if I wanted to say anything about someone who was already an legend in local politics when I arrived at the Bay Guardian in 1982…

Every year, well into her 90s, she would call me and inform me that I would be speaking at the San Francisco Tomorrow holiday party. It wasn’t a request, really – it was a piece of information. Of course I would be there; Jane told me I would.

She was funny, determined, a proud member of the progressive wing of the San Francisco Democratic Party going back to the 1950s, a former journalist, a community organizer and agitator, a Depression-era Oklahoma farm girl who never forgot what it meant to sacrifice for the greater good…(more)

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WeWork Accused of Abandoning San Francisco Development Project

By Malathi Nayak : bloombergquint – excerpt

Bloomberg) — WeWork was accused in a lawsuit of reneging on a pledge to invest $450 million in a San Francisco development project that was supposed to showcase the WeLive communal living initiative.

Parkmerced Investors LLC sued the troubled co-working startup Thursday in New York state court, saying it abandoned a promise to help build WeWork-designed apartments and communal living space with media rooms, hot tubs and activities such as happy hours and yoga classes. Parkmerced Investors is seeking at least $100 million in damages.

The sprawling Parkmerced neighborhood, flanked by a lake and the San Francisco Golf Club, dates back to the 1940s and now offers high-rise apartments and town homes spread across 150 acres. Over the years, the complex has had backing from high-profile investors including the late real-estate billionaire Harry Helmsley and Fortress Investment Group.

The lawsuit comes after WeWork sued Parkmerced Investors in March in the same New York court, claiming it didn’t meet financing conditions for the deal and refused to return a $20 million exclusivity fee to complete the equity investment in the project…(more)

How stable is a project that relies on WeWork to succeed? The current tenants of the existing affordable garden apartments at Parkmerced are watching the corporate investors preparing to demolish their homes fight over millions, after they spent millions for the right to tear it down. The infamous State Supreme Court case overturned a ballot initiative voters fought for to protect the office housing balance that made the city a freedom loving comfortable highly popular cultural icon. Since that case was settled, San Francisco has been tuned into the golden goose that everyone wants a bite of. The city is being picked to the bone by greed and the corruption that it breeds. Hopefully the investors will eat each other and leave the residents in peace.

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Homeless crisis: Newsom proposes ditching environmental review when converting hotels into housing

By Kevin Fagan : sfchronicle – excerpt

Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing that state environmental regulations be waived for cities and counties that want to convert hotels into homeless housing using federal coronavirus relief funding.

His plan was sent to the California Legislature on Friday to be added to the state budget negotiations, and if it remains intact it would eliminate a key tool opponents use to fight projects they don’t want in their neighborhoods. By law, the budget is supposed to be passed by June 15.

Before the pandemic hit this winter, the governor had said he wanted regulations under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) eased for many types of homeless housing, and this current plan — sent in the form of a “trailer bill” addition to budget talks — narrows that ambition… (more)

A few people may explode over this, but, it sounds like the perfect karmic solution. Sort of a boomerang effect, correcting a major flaw in that turned housing into hotels and through many people out onto the street who were previously housed in those hotels. It could be like a happy homecoming to some, moving back into recently repaired rooms they were kicked out of. There are all kinds of possibilities here. Who might object?