Stumping the District
and Looking for Ethics in All the Wrong Places

Candidate for San Francisco School Board h. Brown
cracks an Irish smile during a meet and greet event with staff and board members
of the San Francisco Unified School District.
Photos by Luke Thomas

By h. Brown

October 6, 2008

Did you know that absinthe is 110 proof and bourbon is only around 80 proof? Oh boy, I do now. Really, I’ve drank that stuff before. Way back in the Navy around 50-years ago. It was illegal in the US, so when our ship hit the first Greek port it’s the first thing we all ordered.

It’s kind of got a psychedelic quality. Makes School District superintendents look all wavy. That’s why I accepted when Daniel Cohen broke it out for Fog City Journal editor Luke Thomas and I as we were on our way to meet SFUSD Superintendent Carlos Garcia and his top staff.

All of the candidates for School Board were invited. Eight of us showed up and Luke and I were fashionably late because Luke (“serendipitously”) ran into Nathan Ballard on the way over and had to stop and ask him if Mayor Gavin Newsom (Ballard’s his media guy) would debate the pro’s and con’s of Prop H before the Commonwealth Club.

‘H’ is the newest Public Power torpedo aimed at PG&E and judging from the utility’s response (they live in North Carolina you know and ship all your money back there except for the few million they use for bribes – did you know the City could clear over 200 million a year profit if we ran our own power system the last 7 miles in addition to the 170 miles we already run it from where we generate it at Hetch Hetchy) … so, Luke talked to Ballard and we were late and y’all vote Yes on Prop H (I’m telling everyone that all the ‘No on H’ signs in windows all over town are in the bedrooms of women who’ve rejected me).

Where was I? Yeah, we came into the event at District office and it was not what we’d expected. I expected snacks and wine or soft drinks and casual conversation with Superintendent Garcia and his staff and School Board prez Mark Sanchez and mayoral liaison Hydra Mendoza and, honestly, it was as though they had the most boring and intellectually insulting format they could imagine in order to bore the prospective candidates so badly that they’d drop out of the race.

Folks, I shit you not, these people hand you a pile of papers and then read what it says on the paper to you. No, it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve watched BOS prez Aaron Peskin chase people out of the chambers cause: “We know how to read.” This is a tactic used by bureaucrats to neutralize electeds between them and the money. I spent decades being bored into submission by PowerPoint presentations before there was such a thing as PowerPoint presentations. I kept imagining a cartoon of cave men with sharp rocks scrawling symbols on a cave wall with a torch burning from a skull, and other cave men looking at tablets with the same symbol the guy in front was drawing. Yeah, I’m sure it goes back at least that far.

A girl in the hall asked me what I’d do if I were actually elected as a commissioner and I told her I’d try to get all the dental work I could done before my recall.

So, the advertised 1-hour gathering pushed ’til 5 minutes past and these are people who wear adult diapers so that they can drone on without moving, and Luke and I headed out to see what Newsom’s people at the Ethics Commission were doing to poor Wilma Pang, candidate for 3rd District Supervisor.

Honestly, in the past year the Ethics Commission has investigated a third party vice presidential candidate, an opera singer and a chicken. How the hell do they expect us to take them seriously? When the Board of Supervisors asked Ethics Executive Director John St. Croix if he wanted to increase staff by adding some investigators, he said he wouldn’t know what to have them investigate!

Well, duh! How about the big boys? Huh? Like PG&E, Jim Sutton, Gavin Newsom, Darius Anderson, and h. brown? Huh? Huh?

Someone told me after my inane ramblings that they were starting to see a method to my madness. I told them that they were totally mistaken.

We hit Ethics an hour into their meeting and watched a Public Speaker I didn’t recognize drill their hide to the wall for not following through with promises and mandates (there’s where you could use some of that staff, John).

We’d missed Pang. Luke said that they told him that the Chronicle had been there and that the commission had told Wilma she could have more time to round up the people who’d given her money to come and verify they are genuine.

It was disgusting. There were handouts for the public on a table and there was a list of the 20 or so contributors that St. Croix and Ethics Chair Susan Harriman were challenging. All but one were Chinese and most of their contributions were 50 to 100 dollars. And these bastards don’t blink an eye when Jim Sutton re-routes millions. Why the hell are they after Pang? We left with the stranger who’d nailed St. Croix and the Commission all by himself and I borrowed a fin from Luke for some bourbon and came back to write this.

Back to the School Board candidates.

The 9 candidates present were myself, Sandra Fewer, Rachel Norton, James Calloway, Jaynry Mak, Kimberly Wicoff, Marigrace Cohen and Emily Murase. I noted that incumbents, Jill Wynns and Norman Yee were missing. Where was Bobbi Lopez? Omar Khalif?

When Garcia threw it open for the candidates to ask the Supe and his staff questions, I leaped in front and asked facilities manager, David Golden, how many parcels of land the District owned in the City and how many it owned outside the City, and what the total appraised value (ball park) he estimated they were worth (land and improvements).

He said they didn’t own any land outside the City and I claimed to have read in the Chron that they’d recently consigned eight parcels including one in San Diego County to a company headed by Feinstein’s husband, Dick Blum, for sale. He said he had no knowledge of that and I asked if he was calling the Chron liars?

SFUSD Facilities Manager David Golden

I don’t actually have much of a bedside manner for people who are bleeding the City of its wealth and resources. Golden said he thought that there were around 150 parcels in the City owned by the District and that their value was “probably in the hundreds of millions.” I told him that I thought they were probably worth lots more.

Garcia started a spiel that began to get into protocol that Board members would be expected to follow (were any of us to be elected) and that you couldn’t ask any employee (senior or otherwise) to do anything for you. I countered by asking him what happened to the four public relations staff members that Ackerman had, and if he blocked contact between staff and the press (he said ‘No’ which surprised me). He and other senior staff related that many districts didn’t even allow their staff to speak to the press at all without going through the supe’s office (like it was here last year before he arrived – was that a threat?).

I quote JK Dineen of the SF Business Times this last May 2nd: “CBRE consulting has advised on the disposition of about 30 sites throughout the state… “

Folks, I’m not gonna win this office but the citizens would benefit if I did. Read the Dineen column in Business Times and you’ll see the frame of the planned sell-off of SFUSD property. If eight of them are worth $100 million, 150 of them are worth $2 billion, and you can bet your ass that Golden is working on transferring as many of them as possible as fast as he can to the interests of his former employer, Wells Fargo and their friends. That’s all I’m saying. Personally, I don’t think that an elected School Board member asking questions regarding the status of property owned by the people who elected them is wrong.

If not and I’m elected? See you in court Mr. Superintendent.

Where’s the rain they promised us? I’d take a hurricane now just for the 20” of rain it could bring.

Harold Brown

h. brown is a 62 year-old keeper of sfbulldog.com, an eclectic site featuring a half dozen City Hall denizens. h is a former sailor, firefighter, teacher, nightclub owner, and a hard-living satirical muckraker. His other FCJ articles can be found here. here.

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