News

sftomorrow – excerpt

In case you haven’t heard, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has proposed new rules for NEM ((net metering – the state’s main solar incentive program) that would make solar much more expensive – while disingenuously claiming to promote equity. This is being pushed by the big three investor-owned utilities, including PG&E, and could be voted on by the commission as soon as January 27th.

The utilities have lobbied the CPUC to charge a solar penalty fee of $8 per kilowatt – averaging $57/month – to every solar customer), and to reduce by 80% the credit solar users earn for excess electricity sent back to back the grid. It will put solar out of reach for middle and working class people, hurt small solar companies, and imperil thousands of jobs.

The utilities’ motive is obvious. Locally-generated energy from the sun lowers their profits. It also weakens their argument for building additional huge, potentially fire-hazardous transmission lines – the type of infrastructure spending that led PG&E to announce an 18% rate hike for 2023.

Not only are the proposed changes highly inequitable, they will make the goal of 100% clean electricity by 2045 even more elusive. We need all the solar power we can get, not penalties for households that provide it. We need to speak up. Here are several ways to make your voice heard:

TOMORROW, Thursday Jan 13th: SAVE SOLAR RALLY. Show up (masked) at SF Civic Center Plaza at 11 am sharp, then march a block to CPUC. Bring a sign if you can, but they will have some there. Rsvp here.

Now: Sign petition & email Governor Newsom: https://www.savecaliforniasolar.org/sign-petition Call the governor: Ask him to prove that climate is a priority by standing up for rooftop solar. His number is 916-445-2841. Here’s a sample script. Note: His office only takes calls/voicemails 9 am – 5 pm, Monday – Friday. If the mailbox is full,please try again. Perseverance furthers!

Thursday Jan 27th, 10 am: Call in to CPUC meeting. Re: CPUC Docket #: R.20-08-020. Calendar here. (Agenda with call-in information should be available the day before the meeting.)

BACKGROUND

Here is a fact sheet on the CPUC’s proposal, with citations. And here are FAQs and a toolkit.
Newspaper & online editorials, including SF Chron, LA Times & Sac Bee: https://www.savecaliforniasolar.org/news

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Mayor has hostile response to fair questions from Chan on a topic that could really use some leadership.

Supervisor Connie Chan is taking on a major challenge on an issue that has generated a huge amount of heat in the city: The use of JFK Drive and the Great Highway in a post-pandemic future. And from what I saw at Question Time today, Mayor London Breed isn’t helping.

Chan has said repeatedly that she wants to find some compromise that will allow people with mobility issues and others who need vehicle access to get to the park, and to prevent traffic on the Great Highway from flooding local streets.

But there’s little room for middle ground on this one; both sides are pretty well dug in. It would take real leadership from the Mayor’s Office to find a solution—and instead, the mayor spent her time today insulting Chan…(more)

No love lost between the parties.

By Connie Chan : sfrichmondreview – excerpt

Good and Clean Government

In early 2020, the former director of the Department of Public Works, Mohammed Nuru, was arrested with corruption allegations by the U.S. Attorney. That set off a chain reaction of contractors, department heads, and city officials also being indicted or resigning from their posts.

That’s why I have introduced anti-corruption legislation: the “Good and Clean Government” charter amendment will ensure greater accountability and transparency in all areas of city government in two key ways: by creating an independent City Administrator who can focus on delivering city services free from political cronyism, and by sharing appointments to chartered commissions between the executive and legislative branches…

Currently, commissioners are largely appointed by the mayor with little public process and are often limited to a small group of well-connected political insiders. Many of these commissioners serve the City with dedication and commitment, but the lack of checks and balances opens the door to corruption. Sharing the appointing authority of these commissions between the executive and legislative branches helps assure a balance of power on these important policy-making bodies. Lastly, this measure would also ensure all appointments are subject to a public process.

This is a critical time for our City as we recover from the pandemic, and we need to ensure our departments are focused on serving the needs of the City and its communities. A working system of checks and balances and functioning day-to-day city operations is the foundation of good and clean government. I look forward to bringing this to the voters in June 2022.

Connie Chan represents District 1 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She can be reached at (415) 554-7410 or chanstaff. Find an archive of her columns online at RichmondSunsetNews.com…(more)

By Elena Shao : insideclimatenews – excerpt

Some concrete plants and sand facilities in Bayview-Hunters Point have had only draft permits for years. An air district spokesman said finalizing permits have taken longer “than we would have liked.”

Raymond Tompkins thinks the high efficiency air filters in his old, gold Mercedes are among the car’s best features. They trap dust and tiny pollution particles, and they’re fitted with activated charcoal to help remove odors—an invaluable function for a longtime resident of San Francisco’s most polluted neighborhood.

“You know, I’m supposed to be dead,” Tompkins, 72, said. “Most Black men don’t live this long, here in Bayview. I’ve been going to a funeral every month.”

Living in Bayview-Hunters Point, a mostly low-income and minority neighborhood in the southeastern part of the city, means blinking away the dust from hills of sand and asphalt piled in industrial yards and ignoring the stench from a wastewater treatment facility and an animal rendering plant next door to their homes and schools…(more)

By Rachel Scheier : yahoo – excerpt

It’s the sentimental things people are desperate to recover: a child’s notebook, a wooden cross, an Army backpack that survived two tours in Iraq.

These are among the possessions Mark Dietrich has retrieved from curbsides here in recent months, hastily dumped evidence of the smash-and-grab burglaries and petty thefts that have become a feature of everyday life in the city.

Dietrich is among an increasingly loud group of local activists who say such crime has spun out of control in San Francisco.

“We have all asked ourselves, is it time to go?” he said. “Lots of people have just said, ‘I’m not putting up with this mess.’”…(more)

by Roger Lin and Douglas Carstens : westsideobserver – excerpt

In October, The Housing Workshop released a landmark report about the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). This report, called “CEQA: California’s Living Environmental Law: CEQA’s Role in Housing, Environmental Justice & Climate Change,” focuses on environmental justice and climate change as today’s most urgent environmental issues, including cases studies illustrating how CEQA addresses those problems. It has an in-depth analysis of CEQA’s role, over the last fifty years, in protecting California’s natural landscapes and communities, including some of California’s most iconic places. Coming at this time, the report is an antidote to the vitriol being generated in some quarters to discredit CEQA’s value to California in attempts to weaken it. A strong CEQA is needed now more than ever as California faces unprecedented challenges…

A sustained campaign against CEQA, led by polluting industries, real estate developers, and other special interests, has repeatedly and falsely claimed that … California’s preeminent environmental law is somehow fueling the state’s housing crisis.”…

Unfortunately, in recent months a Big Lie about CEQA has been popping up in California, and it has serious implications for public health and the environment. A Big Lie is a false narrative that is flatly contradicted by incontestable facts but repeated until it gains a life of its own and can no longer be easily refuted. A sustained campaign against CEQA, led by polluting industries, real estate developers, and other special interests, has repeatedly and falsely claimed that – despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary – California’s preeminent environmental law is somehow fueling the state’s housing crisis. Several unsuccessful candidates seized on this false narrative in their efforts to win votes in the recent gubernatorial recall election. (https://calmatters.org/politics/2021/09/newsom-recall-republicans-ceqa-housing/)…

Roger Lin is an attorney at the California Environmental Justice Alliance, a statewide, community-led alliance that works to achieve environmental justice…Douglas Carstens is a partner with Chatten-Brown, Carstens & Minteer, LLP, a law firm specializing in environmental, land use, municipal, and natural resource law based in Hermosa Beach and San Diego…(more)

If you need more arguments to fight fake facts, lies and seriously twisted claims from the government press corps, look not further than the reports in this article and then take the only action out there to reign in the stare bills that are corporatizing control of the land, water, and soon to the food production in what was once a freedom-loving laid back liberal state. The current state of affairs points to a bad ending unless the people speak up and empower themselves and their communities by passing a state constitutional amendment to take back control of California. Details here: https://ourneighborhoodvoices.com/

By Annika Hom : missionlocal – excerpt

Developments in Development is a weekly-ish column recapping news about real estate, housing, planning, and neighborhood changes.

Small Sites, a city program that promises to combat displacement, was dubbed by policymakers as fundamentally good, but “broken,” just a few weeks ago. Not long after, its fate was swept into drama and so-called “political games.” Good thing I love both! Let the games begin!…

San Francisco, we have a problem

The Small Sites Program is a city loan program that helps nonprofits acquire and rehabilitate residential buildings with fewer than 25 units. Since its inception, advocates championed it as a powerful anti-displacement tool that kept low-income tenants in place, and magically kept units affordable forever…

According to multiple nonprofit organizations acquiring these sites, two obstacles prevent filling vacancies quickly: a policy we’ll dive into later, and DAHLIA, the city’s affordable-housing lottery system…

Housing advocates brainstormed some solutions:

• Allow more flexibility with the 80 percent average rent policy;
• Speed up marketing and leasing;
• Create a program-wide or a nonprofit waitlist to use when vacancies open;
• Pull Small Sites from DAHLIA altogether

“These are not new issues, and the solutions are not big revelations,” Cohen said. Still, the mayor’s office politely resists, he said. “This is a policy decision of MOHCD. What’s broken is their attitude.”…

Buildings are amassing debt — and affordable units, dust…(more)

Thanks for the explanation on part of why the affordable housing system is broken. Take a closer look at AMI as that is another can of worms. Put AMI and DHLIA together and you have a failed system. Why pretend it works when it doesn’t? Who benefits from failure?

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Sonja Trauss, appointee to policy agency, is now registered to vote in Oakland

The Regional Planning Committee of the Association of Bay Area Governments has nine members representing cities. The powerful panel promotes development goals for the region, and although one slot is empty, seven of the eight current members are either mayors, deputy mayors, or City Council members of cities in the Bay Area.

There’s one person on the panel who was never elected to anything. That’s Sonja Trauss, a founder of the Yimby movement and failed candidate for District 6 supervisor in San Francisco.

She’s tagged as the representative of the Office of the Mayor, San Francisco…(more)

Political payback since she lost the race. Whether the choice is ethical or fair, we in San Francisco have learned that most of with is not ethical and fair does to yet rise to the level of a criminal challenge. It will be us to us to support the efforts being made by some supervisors to overcome this legal hurdle by fixing some legislative loopholes. Follow the action in the committees as the arguments are being made there before they head to the full board for approval. The only time citizens get to speak on some of these items is in committee.