SFSOS newsletter slams Newsom

SFSOS President Wade Randlett.
Photo by Luke Thomas

February 8, 2007

In today's Chronicle, SFSOS President Wade Randlett sounds positively restrained about a future with five more years of Mayor Gavin Newsom. SFSOS has a long history of backing Newsom.

Contrast those comments with the vitriol contained in the following SFSOS newsletter that went out this morning to their mailing list.

SFSOS Newsletter, dated February 7, 2007

It's up to us to pursue a Quality of Life agenda for SF. Well, there’s no point in ignoring the elephant in the room...

The Newsom sex and booze scandal has terminated any hopes of an affirmative agenda for Quality of Life coming out of Room 200 at City Hall, at least for the remainder of this election, and potentially for the four long years that follow.

Supervisors Peskin, Daly, and the rest of the extreme greens no longer need to couch their attacks on Newsom as policy attacks. Now they can just ignore him or force him to sue for peace on their terms.

To the many ex-Newsom supporters who valiantly held out hope that the Mayor would come to his senses and lead the charge for the reforms that led you to vote for him in 2003, consider the facts:

Since his 2003 election, Newsom-era policies make it harder to own a home; harder to drive without hitting a pothole, harder to get a garage permit for your own home; harder to find a park gardener keeping his schedule; harder to get across town on Muni; harder to find a parking spot; harder to afford a spot if you find one; harder to pay your parking tickets, and harder to get through the line just to enter a garage so you can avoid a ticket in the first place.

As for pathologies that are merely exacerbated by City Hall malpractice and negligence, it’s easier now to get mugged or murdered; easier to get your computer bag stolen from your car in a smash and grab; harder to walk a street un-besieged by graffiti; harder to find a family on your block; harder to get into your neighborhood school; and much harder to feel optimistic about your school with the last great nationally recognized Superintendent having been driven out undefended some 18 months ago.

There is one fly in the political ointment for the extreme greens: Newsom’s City Hall politics are not the same as the democratic demands of San Francisco citizens. A broad majority of common sense voters want a city government that delivers clean, safe and paved streets, well kept parks, un-vandalized buildings, excellent neighborhood schools, and crime that gets punished. None of those is the case today. None of those problems was getting more than lip service from the pre-scandal Newsom administration.

As busy as you are, achieving quality of life reforms is now up to you. Newsom’s political collapse only makes it painfully obvious. Rather than hold onto a thin hope that a post-2007 Newsom would pick up where he promised he would start post-Care Not Cash, we can now look to ourselves and our neighborhood leaders to make change.

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