Tourking it up a notch, hired gun Alex Tourk rubs shoulders
with the new Billy Whiz kid on the block, BOS Prez David Chiu,
following Chiu’s soliloquy to the building tradesters Tuesday.
Photos by Luke Thomas
By Hope Johnson
May 7, 2009
After several weeks of constructing loud and confusing noise, the San Francisco Building Construction and Trade Council (BCT) held a rally in front of City Hall Tuesday to announce they’ve finally decided exactly why they’re upset.
To turn up the political spin on this previously unfocused anger, they’ve hired Mayor Gavin Newsom’s former Deputy Chief of Staff turned publicist Alex Tourk.
BCT Secretary-Treasurer Michael Theriault now firmly states labor leaders are pretty steamed over the passage of Proposition J.
Michael Theriault: Friends, San Franciscans, tradesmen, lend me your ears.
No, no, you haven’t missed the special election. It’s not until May 19.
Voters approved this Prop J all the way back in November. It creates the Historic Preservation Commission that oversees the designation of property as historic in San Francisco. According to Theriault, labor leaders believe proposed changes to the language in the planning code under Prop J will prevent creation of future construction jobs.
BCT’s claims against Prop J, their new business association with Tourk, and continued media propaganda all add to the mounting evidence that political opponents of the Progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors are upset over the power shift away from moneyed interests that occurred in last November’s elections.
Construction workers related stories of unemployment hardships at the rally. However, just as it was misleading for the Bush administration to continuously pair Saddam Hussein with terrorist attacks in New York, it’s purposefully misleading for labor leaders to associate current unemployment with historic protection provisions under Prop J. The ongoing nationwide economic crisis has brought construction to a standstill all over the State, from the East Bay to Orange County, municipalities with and without historic preservation statutes in place.
Conservative moderates in San Francisco have good reason for wanting to damage the reputations of Progressives Peskin and Daly, whose endorsements of candidates in upcoming district and mayoral elections will be influential.
The Bay Area Reporter suggests today that Laura Spanijian, conservative moderate supervisorial candidate for District 8, voted for Daly over moderate August Longo for Regional Director for just this reason.
The Chron’s C.W. Nevius did his best to contribute to discrediting Peskin by announcing Board President David Chiu, and well-known progressive Planning Commissioner Christina Olague, would speak at BCT’s rally, emphasizing both were either endorsed or appointed by Peskin and leaving the impression both may break solidarity with Progressives. Nevius followed up but made no mention of the fact both Chiu and Olague spoke out at the rally against the smear campaign on Peskin and Daly.
C.W. Nevius reluctantly shakes Chiu’s hand while Larry Mazzola Jr.
prepares to discard a Supervisor Chris Daly pro-union leaflet.
Board Prez David Chiu demonstrates a sublime ability
to use reason over hyperbole.
Planning Commissioner Christine Olague,
who recently converted from Green to Dem,
defends Daly and Peskin’s record of labor support
but shares Theriault’s Prop J concerns.
Here’s looking at you, kid.
Oh, well, the Chron isn’t so good at propaganda anyway. Nevius states, “Everyone keeps saying the tiff between labor and the far left is much ado about nothing,” even though his colleague Willie Brown claimed the opposite just a few days prior.
No wonder Theriault alleges it was the media who “garbled” the message of labor leaders at BCT’s rally at the Democratic Party’s Unity luncheon last month. On the other hand, BCT itself failed to make clear on its own intent. Check out FCJ’s video of Daly with the union members outside the luncheon. Signs demand the resignation of Daly and Peskin but no mention is made of Prop J.
Anyway, the BCT may have put Tourk on the payroll just in time. Letters to the editor, Chron writers and bloggers are not buying the Prop J stole our jobs construction, and labor leaders may eventually need Tourk to clean up their own image with union members.
Recurrent Energy’s photovoltaic deal needs one taxpayer protection amendment
The Board of Supervisors passed the first reading of a controversial contract Tuesday with Recurrent Energy to install and operate a solar plant on the Sunset Reservoir. One of several concerns raised includes the City’s buyout option at years seven and fifteen. Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi put his best foot forward to amend the legislation to cap Recurrent’s profit on a buyout, but Supervisor Eric Mar, departing with his Progressive colleagues, seemed more persuaded by Sierra Club John Rizzo’s singular climate change interests, rather than protecting taxpayers from potentially getting gouged.
Noone we’ve talked to wants to scuttle the deal, but an amendment may still be possible to set in stone how much profit Recurrent Energy will be able to realize when the City chooses to exercise its buyout option. As it stands now, “fair market value” could mean anything.
FCJ spoke with Supervisor Mar yesterday who said he is willing to support a mutually agreeable buyout cap amendment. But, he warned, time is running out fast before next Tuesday’s second reading.
As an aside, it will be interesting to see how quickly gubernatorial hopeful Gavin Newsom Tweets this project as one of his questionable achievements.
Stay tuned.
Fun Fact
FCJ highly recommends the theatrical stage comedy Stale Magnolias currently at Glama-Rama in the Mission. Read FCJ’s review, here.
Luke Thomas contributed to this article.
The Hunger Site
May 11, 2009 at 11:16 pm
These people all look so dodgy. Is this the cast out of Star Trek the next constipation.
AJ
May 11, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Conservative Moderates? that is an oxymoron.
You can’t be both at the same time. You are either one or the other.
May 11, 2009 at 7:25 am
jtothed, don’t distract the discussion to Prop 13 from how monetary policy has supercharged unsustainable construction and how you all have grown used to that. Low interest rate fueled sprawl and construction bloat has occured in many localities around the country such as Florida, Europe saw the same; only in California is there Prop 13.
Where have the BTC and the Labor Councils been with their resources to try to redo Prop 13 to eliminate corporate protections masquerading as keeping grandma in her home?
Low interest rate fueled sprawl is not smart development. Luxury condos in working class neighborhoods with stressed out, undermaintained capital systems is not smart development. Given that Prop 13 is a reality and given that development is immensely profitable, either you all pay your freight or we wait until we can all repeal Prop 13. Otherwise, working stiffs are subsidizing Your Good Thing while screwing over our communities.
Where’s the solidarity in outsourcing your few months of paycheck and high developer profits to working stiffs over the period of decades, brother?
The reasons why SF housing is off the hook are legion. First, we are a boutique market where many seek ownership here based on resources not connected to the local wage base, such as empty nester pied a terres, international investors, etc. Second, portions of the regional wage base are much higher than elsewhere, generally Silicon Valley, etc. Finally, we’ve seen that adding supply does not lower price, but constricting capital with tighter money does. Deflationary price drops are not desirable because they portend much more serious economic problems.
A planning commissioner actually told me that we should rejoice at plummeting housing prices because a friend of hers got in to the SoMa Grand for less than $400K. How many families are being put through the meat grinder in order to tamp down demand to the extent where a condo costs $350K?
Overbuilding tanked the exurban housing market, but tight money and low demand are tanking the SF housing market. SF’s housing market will fall less over time and recover faster because it appeals to a different market segment.
Gabriel Metcalf from SPUR, the developer lobbyists who are major cheerleader for your cause, has a fallacy that I call Metcalf’s fallacy. It asserts that building luxury condos in San Francisco will compete with tract homes in Tracy and lower prices for housing here, reduce commutes and sprawl. Problem being that even in the “good days” of the bubble, SF housing cost 2x that of Tracy housing–hardly competing in the same market.
The impacts of suburban/exurban sprawl and luxury condos in SF are different, but both caused by the distortion due to economically unjustifiable low interest rates.
The middle ground, of course, is to densify locations around BART stations in the East Bay to the 4 story densities we see in San Francisco. This would produce several times the maximum potential build out envelope even with recent SF rezoning, but would be more affordable under average conditions and not wreck SF’s few remaining working class communities. Unless you want to pay $25 for a burger to pay the flippers to commute from Brentwood, it makes economic sense to keep a supply of working class housing in a few SF neighborhoods.
I’ve got no problems negotiating with the BTC or RBA to determine an equitable course forward. Problem being, that real estate development is the major source of campaign cash and electeds are either bought by real estate interests or are afraid of being targeted by them and tend to not rock the boat in this regard.
There can be no negotiation when one side has bought the outcome in a process that is supposed to be the sacrosanct temple of democracy.
Of course, this is where representative democracy fails the sovereigns because even the best of our electeds are corruptable, and this causes government to act against the objective best interests of voters, citizens and residents.
-marc
May 10, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Marc,
Some of your comments actually hold water, just not based on your theories. The inequities tied to increased taxes cut from many different needs. The sewer hypothesis you put forth is bunk, though. The same would go for parcel taxes for General Hospital, school bonds, park bonds and the like. They ALL have one root cause and it is not the BCT. It’s Prop 13.
The fact that your neighbor who has lived in their house for 40 years and pays only $600 a year in property tax is the problem. That doesn’t cover the cost of the necessary maintenance of the systems they use.
More importantly it is the guys like Schorenstein, San Giacomo, and other long term large property owners who use the property as income that are getting over in this system.
Responsible growth/redevelopement is not evil in and of itself. Usage taxes like sewer/sales/bus(fares) are unfair because they are offered up without serious consideration of effect on disposable income.
The next real leader on the left will be the one who fearlessly adresses this issue, career be damned. Until balance is brought into this arena, all civic institutions (city, county,state, education, public health) are going to choke to death from underfunding.
As far as housing prices in the city, that is a lot more complex than you make it out to be. This has as much to do with regional issues as with the banks. The abundance of building in the eastern counties rode the wave up, but led the crash down.
Imagine dropping a brick in the center of a still pool. The waves ripple out to the edge and reflect back in upon themselves. The outgoing waves do not get too big and the dissonat return waves do not get too turbulent. When the waves get larger as they move from the center, that is when the turbulance is too large to bear.
WTF? you say? Well my point is that developement in San Francisco was not the culprit, but rather the work down in outlying regions(not built union BTW). The work in San Francisco would have happened anyway because of nature of the city as a hub for high tech/ science and research, and because the work that went into collecting and guiding the parcels through the entitlement process started long before George and Alan fudged the books. It was their fudging that led to the overheating and overcorrection, not the BCT.
As for your retort to my comments on developement in transit corridors, remember that most of that work will not be done by the BCT. But to think it won’t happen is foolish. The housing needs to get built because the people are still coming…whether you like it or not,
May 10, 2009 at 3:03 pm
JT,
Well, first you got ‘h. bombed’ and now you’ve been ‘Marc’d’. So, welcome to the discussion and I hope you’ll stay beyond this issue.
And, Marc?
Happy mother’s day, you mutha and don’t chase the new kids off the swings every time.
h.
May 10, 2009 at 7:33 am
jtothed,
Would love to live in your world for a moment, where unemployed working people are all of a sudden anti-labor because we see your alliances with developers and Wall Street for what they are.
Every time that a market rate housing unit is entitled in a working class neighborhood of San Francisco, studies show that the resulting uptick in economic level leads to competition at a higher price level for adjacent existing units as well as a replacement of affordable commercial uses with boutique crap.
You did not have a boom over the past few years. The Federal Reserve offered up cheap capital like cocaine through low interest rates, and the US build up overcapacity in housing by like 20%. There were no market forces demanding this housing, the market was distorted by unrealistically cheap capital.
Of course, the moderate politicians which the BCT has supported over the years are the same ones who have been allied with the Growth Machine. In their spare moments when they have not been lowering any barriers to land use planning and zoning in order to facilitate unsustainable development, they’ve been figuring out ways to outsource American jobs and insource cheap south Asian labor to keep our wages down.
Finally, the housing you all build not only is not affordable to most San Franciscans, but stubbornly refuses to pay its full freight by covering the infrastructure costs that it requires and paying full freight on the city services it will consume.
This leaves existing homeowners to pay higher taxes to cover the infrastructure of new construction or suffer crumbling systems, and to pay more taxes to fund the operations of city government or suffer even worse levels of city services.
SO in your twisted world, aided and abetted by the tribunes of working Americans like Wall Street and developers, the entirety of city government needs to articulate itself to facilitate your temporary employment.
Got news for you bud, your interests and the interests of San Franciscans are wholly at odds here. This is why you all need to resort to gang warfare in order to squeeze out your entitlements. Until you all learn to cooperate with the natives instead of attacking us, you’re going to find it a very difficult row to hoe demanding we service your needs for temporary jobs at grave cost to our position.
-marc
May 9, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Luke I’ll consider that a polite “get lost” and I’ll do just that.
May 9, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Foggers, let’s keep the discourse on the issues.
gav4guv, you’re crossing the line with your threats. Consider this a polite warning.
May 9, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Hey jto,
I don’t know why Luke posted the Gavin4guv creep. They don’t represent anything I care about. I’ll take your word on the housing and listen to see if anyone reading this wants to tell me what used to be at 301 Mission or whatever but present use is certainly noble.
Good for you for being a native. I wasn’t honored to be born here but all 3 of my grandkids were and I’m proud of it. I don’t think it gives a special dispensation unless you’re climbing the ladder at SFPD.
My old man walked the picket lines in St. Louis with Jimmy Hoffa and got beaten up for it. I’m rank and file to the bone but most of our leaders have always been for sale. Most of our politicians too.
I’d like to see solar panel fabrication in what’s left of the old industrial areas (whatever Sophie Maxwell hasn’t spot-zoned into condos for the wealthy) and federal money to turn every public rooftop in town black with the things.
How about a series of canals branching off a revived Islais Creek run back to the sea and crossed by a similar sized waterway running both ways North and South over what’s now Stanyan?
There’s always no end of building possible. Instead of putting pre-fab junk toilets in the parks I’d like to see the originals re-plumbed and joined with matching cafes and the like.
We’re not that far apart. You guys just started to lose but my side’s been losing for decades. The powers that be will always try to pit us against each other. That’s the ‘gavin4guv’ type. I’m glad you’re not taking the bait.
Good talking to you,
h.
May 9, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Harold,
1) Arnet Watson (SP?) Apartments 650 Eddy St.
transitional housing for the homeless.
2) Glide Housing @ 125 Mason similar to the above, but tied to Glide Memorial, also a benefit of Olagues and Daly’s hammer on 301 Mission
3) Student Housing Mission Bay UCSF was an old wherehouse district even when you got to town.
4) Infrastructure work for the new Laguna Honda.
5) Infrastructure work for the water department.
I was a little kid when the old International Hotel/filipino town thing happened. Odds are you and I are the only two reading this who even know whats going to go up on that cursed site. Definitely not a shining moment for anyone involved with the City at that time.
While we’re not always going to agree, at least you know I’m not a shill for anybody but me.
gavin4guv,
Choke on it you little pantshitter. I’m not a plumber, not a shill for Rob Black, and not deterred by your threats. I’m just a pain in the ass blue collar native.
And as far “We’ve got serious muscle now and you all aren’t getting too many more warnings before you won’t know what hit you.” my only response is that before you get too bold, remember the only real sleeping giant left in SF Politics is the combined native vote. Go too far and you’ll start a fire you can’t put out.
j to the d
May 9, 2009 at 1:58 pm
God damn boy,
You’re hell of a thoughtful writer. Can you at least get a handle that’s easy to pronounce? I understand why many need to be anonymous. You’re clearly not someone who uses the option maliciously and I apologize you for characterizing it as such.
To answer your other questions. Start naming the projects you’ve worked on and are proudest of and I’ll start naming the populations removed to make the “parking lots” that your workers encountered on their first days on the job.
You know about development. To clear occupied land for such projects such as the ones that paid your mortgage and probably still are you need to first have it declared ‘blighted’ (see Walter Shorenstein/Golden Gate/Tenderloin/International Hotel if you need a definition of this).
As soon as the new owners have purchased control of the land upon which your wholly innocent lambs will build their skyscrapers, they move to establish the areas as ‘blighted’.
This means making the lives of the people who have lived in those zones their entire lives as miserable as possible. Surely you’ve read ‘City for Sale’? That’s the best description I’ve seen of the process.
So, for every skyscraper your people have built, thousands of tenants and shoe repair shops and hundred year old neighborhood bars have been driven out beforehand by people like those that run Hines and Shorenstein (how’d you like that International Hotel method? … burn em alive) … these people may take a decade or more to clear land for you to walk in and build upon but the … ghosts of the diaspora of the souls and dreams of the poor from whose suffering you now profit …
Only kidding a bit. Those parking lots you’re so proud to build upon? People used to live there. People used to have local businesses hiring thousands of other people and they are no longer there.
Show me a vacant lot in San Francisco and I can show you an album of tragedies.
h.
May 9, 2009 at 1:58 pm
jhead I have been watching creepy ‘Joe the Plumber” guys coming at me for awhile now including your truly evil shill Rob Black. I’ll tell you one more time the dumb tenants have been driven out of town. You know where to go. We’ve got serious muscle now and you all aren’t getting too many more warnings before you won’t know what hit you….
May 9, 2009 at 11:38 am
Harold,
Never called you a liar, but rereading my previous comment I see that I lumped you with someone you may or may not agree with.
But you didn’t answer the question of a BCT job that evicted people. As for the St.Anthony’s building, they own it and it would be their decision to take it down and build a facility to meet their growing needs, not unlike the medical building across the street.
Never said that I’d be on the food line, I haven’t been off since Labor Day although many of my brothers and sisters have been. But I assure you fellow brothers and sisters of mine will be. As you know, this isn’t a recession, but rather a full blown depression with relief only for the wealthy. You, I, and all others reading this are going to be hammered with inflation in the next year or two. As you remember from the late seventies, that means it gets harder to keep up with the rising cost of food/rent/healtchare if you got it/etc and that is IF you even have a job.
Call it hiding all you want, but I do not reveal my name because of the gauranteed repercussions from all sides: work, politics, fellow members, any nut job with a computer can wreak havoc on your life. I merely offer a differing opinion to the conversation. I am not apologizing, nor would I presume to speak for anybody other than myself.
You rise in defense of Daly for exactly what I called out in my previous comment: his defense of those in his district. But I also agreed with what you said about Prop J, and you did not speak to the issues I had raised about it.
Remember, this blog is not about who is who, but about the discussion of where we as a city are going to go in the future. Collectively we shall step on our own feet many times before we get something right. But our failures should not deter us from attempting to get it right, nor should our successes blind us to our failures.
still,
jtothed
May 9, 2009 at 9:26 am
jtohed,
First, please use your name. Anyone who calls me a liar and hides behind an anonymous tag is chickenshit. Look in the mirror, jtohed, you see chickenshit looking back at you?
So, you’re a big union man? Were you one of the ‘brothers’ who testified on behalf of Hines in their fight to tear down the Longshoremans Hall?
And, you won’t be in line at St. Anthony’s. I eat there out of necessity often and the word there is that it will be torn
down in the near future so that you guys can make a few million tossing up another unneeded structure.
The difference in you and the people you’re attacking from behind your mask is that we’re all unpaid idealists. You’re a self-centered opportunist. My advice? I’ll quote one of the top boys in your electricians local who told Daly: “Hey, times are tough. Suck it up and get over it.”
Identify yourself or shut up.
h.
May 8, 2009 at 7:14 pm
gavin4guv, h, and the rest of the anti-labor left,
Exactly how many tennants were evicted out of rent controlled buildings by a Building and Construction Trades job? None that I can recall. unless you can call a car in a parking lot a tennant.
Go check on the progreesive’s Bank of the RBA and you’ll see, as I have said repeatedly, that it was they not the BCT that had people ousted/ellised/displaced.
Luke and Hope and the FCJ continue to misrepresent
the issues of the BCT, and what is even more dissappointing is that it continues now with their lies about the BCTs view on Historic Preservation. We do support Preservation, especially since it was our members who built the beauties the first time.
Our concerns mirror Harold Brown’s in many ways, because it has become obvious that Prop J was the save Aaron’s View Act. Take the time to download the proposed changes to Articles 10 & 11 and compare to the existing and you’ll see that this has now become a way to ensure higher rents, loss of the working middle class, and a further debased tax base as the concentration and stagnation of property under Prop 13 rules will make this a boon for San Giacomo immitators.
(And to head off the expected talk about Trinity Plaza, the BCT doesn’t trust him as far as they can throw his bank vault. He finally went with us so he could staff this large scale work, but he has not been a friend to, or customer of union contractors over the last 30+ years.)
What you’ll see is a new board given more authority through Daly/Peskin’s proposed changes, and it has the potential to stop much needed housing in transit friendly areas. Look at the Balboa Area Plan, Glen Park Plan, and the visions to increase affordable and workforce housing on major transit corridors like Geary Blvd, Judah St, Mission St, 3rd St etc.
People are still going to come to San Francisco, and unless you want them all to be rich and out of touch, or forced to live in ever increasing desperate conditions, you need to oppose these additional changes.
While nobody can doubt Daly’s defensive tactics to protect the citizens of his district, right or wrong, he is throwing the baby out with the bathwater on this one. It simply goes too far, and as a matter of fact will stifle some of the things Daly has fought for over the last few years.
Fr. John Hardin from St. Anthony’s spoke to gathering of BCT workers today. They had raised some money for the foundation, and as he thanked them he acknowleged that some of their members will be in his line in the near future. That those who had given their time to help St. Anthony’s, and earned a fair wage during the week, were never very far from the other side of the counter.
And before Marc comes over the top with a “Boo Fecking Hoo,” he should remember that in normal times a BCT worker only works 9-10 months a year. The last 3 years were a bounty, but not the norm. Hopefully their savings will carry them through to the return to work. Many have been off 8 months already, with no hope in sight for the next year.
Think about the average worker, not the ones you can’t stand.
May 8, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Local 38 doesn’t care if tenants get evicted, or if rent controlled buildings are replaced by ‘market rate’ million dollar condos. If the building trades need jobs why don’t they build in San Jose??? The dumb tenants have been driven out of town. The tenants who are still here you shouldn’t mess with, yet you continue….
May 8, 2009 at 7:52 am
Hey Citizenchris,
Your boys attack my boy. I attack your boys. You don’t see no yellow handkerchief hanging outtta my back pocket do you? You piss on us, we piss back. You seem like a nice guy. Lots of BCT people aren’t and your leaders are selfish bastards.
h.
May 8, 2009 at 6:57 am
The Building and Construction Trades have 20%+ unemployment. No one on Fog City seems to care that people are losing their jobs. All construction workers seem to be whenever I read FCJ are thugs and mobsters. Does everyone always have to play into these horrible stereotypes even those on the supposed Left?
The talk of unsustainable growth is also non-sense. With thousands of highly skilled members on the out of work lists on union benches imagine all that needs done. The streets in San Francisco are horrible. Has anyone drove around Bernal Heights lately? Doyle Drive needs to be rebuilt for the sake of public safety. Can’t we work together? Look at high speed rail this is a project that the BCT poured huge money to help get passed. The enviromental tradoffs for rail can be huge.
In my view there are many positive areas where Labor, Greens and transportation advocates can find common ground. It does no good to keep savaging the Building Trades.
May 7, 2009 at 9:17 pm
A little of both,
I also voted against Prop J but for a different reason. I assumed it was just another attempt by Aaron Peskin to control the world.
Of course, I was right.
The reason Mazzola is able to keep his cast from ‘Goodfellas’ on the street (be honest, doesn’t he look just like Joe Pesci?) … reason he can do it is because they get paid to picket from a union fund that he and his pop control. As you noticed that, when asked (see the Fog City Video) … when asked why they were there, none of the workers had much of a clue. It was almost like looking at a bus of paid stooges from the A. Philip Randolph mob.
h.
May 7, 2009 at 7:18 pm
If there is going to be a table at which this will all be hashed out and discussed, then it cannot be Gavin Newsom’s table, because as Matt points out, there is no point in participating if city staff working for department heads working for the Mayor are in control of the process and outcomes.
The growth machine here cannot countenance dissenting views being expressed by communities even though they hold sufficient power to kill these proposals at the end of the day and it would be very difficult for the Board of Supervisors to find 8 votes to the contrary.
In their roles as officers of the City, Chiu and Olague have to speak with everyone. My concern that the BTC’s role in any conversation would not be limited to participant but the game would be arranged such that the BTC would be given power as decider.
These folks have built unsustainable sprawl and sent our unsustainable economy off of a cliff. Their unsustainable interests cannot be allowed to dominate any outcome.
-marc
May 7, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Any idea of what labor people outside Mazzola’s fiefdom think about what he’s doing? It would be great to get an op-ed from Robert Haaland for FCJ.
Also, David Chiu needs to be extra careful. It’s important to be civil but you still MUST keep yourself at least at arm’s length from the likes of Alex Tourk. They are not, have not, and never will be interested in seeing or even respecting your point of view, even though they don’t seem “all that bad.”
May 7, 2009 at 3:34 pm
A wee bit of history, please. When Proposition J first came about, proponents argued that “reusing and rehabbing our historic buildings and neighborhoods instead of demolishing them reduces consumption of scarce resources and assures that our history doesn’t end up in a landfill.â€
Hello? No one was arguing AGAINST preserving historic buildings and the reduced “consumption of scarce resources†was hardly the issue. Yeah, think of all the sheet-rock and nails we’ll save.
The San Francisco Planning Commission has a Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board and a Historic Preservation Program. Locally, State and Federal incentives encourage property owners to repair, restore and rehabilitate historic resources in lieu of demolition. These are just a few of the reasons why I wisely voted “No†on Proposition J and would gladly do so again.
Regarding Planning Commissioner Christine Olague’s recently conversion from Green to Dem, would some one please kindly explain to me the difference between the two parties? No, on second thought, let’s discuss the difference at the next Progressive Convention when we all decide who we don’t want to run for Mayor.
May 7, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Alex Tourk. heh heh. Hey I didn’t say anything!
May 7, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Thanks, Chris G. Now corrected.
May 7, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I thought Laura Spanijian would be running in District 8?