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The San Francisco Examiner Newspaper
No budget, no pay for lawmakers
- California’s 2008 version of the annual summer budget stalemate seems even more aggravating than usual. It feels like the latest sequel in an over-familiar blockbuster movie series with which the public is already fed up, and nobody is quite sure why this latest movie was even made.
Public-transit plan is a winner
- The Examiner generally opposes City Hall’s enthusiasm for burdening San Francisco’s struggling smaller business with extra expenses — paid sick leave, health care, higher minimum wage — that competitors in neighboring towns are not forced to pay.
Street sweeping: Less is more
- The City’s long-neglected battle against trash has been much in the news lately, with a controversial proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom to require universal three-bin recycling and composting, and also with a good report card for reduced street littering. Our lessened litter count apparently is partially due to the mayor’s counterintuitive but successful less-is-more experiment in removing some 400 of The City’s approximately 5,000 sidewalk trash cans last year.
‘Historic’ chance for Tenderloin
- Any outsider who wanders into today’s Tenderloin neighborhood without having specific business there would presumably be arriving by accident. The neighborhood between upscale Union Square and Nob Hill is a gritty, downtrodden home to an uneasy mixture of about 29,000 working-poor residents — mostly immigrant families — coexisting with transient drug dealers, addicts and prostitutes, plus a sprinkling of struggling artists.
City wins one round in litter fight
- For too long, an embarrassing feature of The City environment has been that some of our most attractive vistas are routinely littered with ugly fast-food wrappers and miscellaneous windblown papers, sticky wads of chewing gum, cigarette butts and tire-slashing broken glass. Often as not, the most heavily trafficked corridors suffer the worst littering.
Lessons of the Cosco Busan crash
- Those multiple investigations of the disastrous Cosco Busan oil spill are slowly grinding out criminal charges in the crash, which fouled 50 miles of local shoreline with 53,000 gallons of dumped fuel, killed some 2,500 birds and cost upwards of $60 million to clean up.
Tobacco-sale ban is too narrow
- Although unlikely to happen, it is technically still possible Tuesday for the Board of Supervisors to overturn their particularly misguided ban on the sale of tobacco products in pharmacies, which would be exactly the right thing to do. Like all San Francisco legislation, the ban faces its mandatory second vote Tuesday.
Make taggers clean up their acts
- A deluded urban myth attempts to portray graffiti vandals as artistic rebels whose decorative contributions brighten drab cityscapes. But it is doubtful whether many San Franciscans feel civic pride when they see The City streets defaced with ugly graffiti — on building walls, storefronts, bus stops, Muni vehicles, commercial trucks, signs, highway structures or just about any spray-paintable surface. Particularly offensive is when impressive public murals are obscured by sloppy scrawls.
10 worst ideas of the week: Aug. 3
- Your trash could soon be other people’s business, China tries to keep the media from surfing the Web ahead of the Olympics, and tobacco sales in pharmacies could come to an end.
10 brightest ideas of the week: Aug. 3
- The City passes a budget with little quarreling, Bay Area bridges are in better shape than most of the country’s bridges, and the streets become a little bit cleaner.
City slow on personnel discipline
- Alleged rogue computer genius Terry Childs, charged with locking The City’s entire information-technology staff out of the fiber-optic network he assembled to handle San Francisco’s central database needs — payroll, e-mail, etc. — is still jailed on $5 million bail. Yet he officially remains a municipal employee on unpaid administrative leave. And the City Attorney’s Office says it could require at least one year to terminate him.
Muni drivers block rule fixes
- Doesn’t anybody remember November’s so-called “Muni reform measure?” Proposition A was sold to voters as a win-win that would automatically cause many good things to happen — better transit service for the public, reduction of global warming, more dependable pay for Muni employees and an end to embarrassingly lax work rules.
Pay to drive downtown?
- We can already hear those screams of rage if The City ever really follows through on a plan to charge vehicles for driving in the congested downtown area during peak hours. The San Francisco County Transportation Authority is farther along than ever in exploring details of a “congestion pricing” proposal along the lines of London’s successful version.
Michael Marley
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