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The San Francisco Examiner Newspaper
Removing small-business red tape
- Anyone wishing to enter a Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy needs only to try starting a small business in San Francisco. Traversing the labyrinth of required permits will routinely necessitate submitting the forms and fulfilling the regulations of as many as a dozen departments and agencies.
SoMa’s risky $34 million windfall
- What we know about the South of Market neighborhood’s unprecedented high-rise developer “impact” fees is that during the next four years, a $34 million SoMa Community Stabilization Fund will flow to a brand-new advisory committee chosen from a pool of applicants and approved by the Board of Supervisors. What we don’t know yet is how wise the money distributions recommended by this committee — largely comprised of SoMa nonprofit representatives with a vested interest in obtaining some of the payouts — will be.
HealthySF loophole disgraceful
- The 734 San Francisco businesses that complied with the controversial HealthySF law’s April 30 deadline to send in the first health-insurance payments for 12,900 employees cannot be blamed if they feel cheated by City Hall. They are being penalized for obeying the law and paying on time.
Congestion-based toll a sound idea
- Trying out congestion pricing makes sense because it simultaneously gives commuting drivers both a carrot and a stick for either switching to public transit or working flextime hours. Both alternatives would reduce the steadily worsening gridlock on Bay Area roadways during rush hours, and The Examiner strongly supports testing congestion pricing locally soon.
SFO shuttle system needs fixing
- The 13 shuttle-van companies serving San Francisco International Airport must be doing something right, because they carried approximately 470,000 flight passengers last year. But airport officials say they receive “unacceptably frequent” complaints from dissatisfied shuttle riders who grumble that van operators are too difficult to reach by phone, charge higher rates than were quoted and travel roundabout routes. Also, the three van pickup locations at SFO are too hard to find.
Mandatory furloughs a good start to solving deficit
- Yes, it will be easier said than done. But The City could save $26.5 million and cancel up to 8 percent of its upcoming $300 million-plus deficit by simply requiring the 12,562 municipal employees paid from the operating budget to take four unpaid days off sometime during the next fiscal year.
911 emergency phone ‘fee’ muddle
- The California 1st District Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 3-0 last week that local governments cannot charge phone customers a monthly fee for access to the 911 emergency phone system without two-thirds voter approval. The judges said such user fees were actually special-use taxes requiring direct voter balloting as specified by Proposition 218 in 1996.
Deferred maintenance is expensive
- When local governments run short of money, as so often they do, one of the easiest budget items to cut is infrastructure maintenance. After all, the pavements and park greenery could still be fixed next year, so not many voters will care or even notice that routine upkeep has been skimped yet again. Maintenance cutbacks are politically much safer than discontinuing some popular service program.
Another weapon to tame street
- When a freeway shares the surface streets of a residential neighborhood, expect problems. On 19th Avenue, those problems include five fatalities in 2007. Between 2000 and 2005, there were 1,205 injuries and 12 deaths — because 19th Avenue is also seven miles of state Highway 1 connecting San Mateo and Marin counties via western San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. Most fatalities were pedestrians hit while crossing the wide and confusingly marked thoroughfare.
Care Not Cash on road to success
- Ever since then-Supervisor Gavin Newsom proposed his controversial Care Not Cash initiative, which was passed by city voters in 2002, the homeless advocacy establishment has been incensed over this policy to provide housing and services to certain homeless welfare recipients instead of giving them cash aid to continue living in the streets. And the opposition has never ceased throughout Newsom’s mayoral terms.
Please, Congress, stop ‘fixing’ our student loans
- Believing itself infallibly wise, Big Government would rather cover its tracks than admit a blunder. So it was no surprise that Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. George Miller, D-Concord, respectively chairmen of the Senate and House Committees on Education and Labor, blithely forced through Congress this week a stopgap solution to the impending student-loan crisis without acknowledging that they created the problem in the first place.
Biggest solar installer dumped on
- Next in line to abandon San Francisco for a more hospitable Bay Area business venue is Solar City, the company that installs more solar panels each week than any other company in California. The Solar City CEO said he will not proceed with plans to open a worker-training academy in San Francisco’s job-hungry Bayview neighborhood unless The City finalizes its promised rebate program within 30 days.
High court focuses on voter IDs
- Constitutional law degrees aren’t necessary when mere common sense is sufficient to conclude, as did the U.S. Supreme Court Monday, that an Indiana law requiring a photo ID to vote “is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral voting process.’” The court thus affirmed on a 6-3 vote both common sense and the Constitution in recognizing that states have the right to safeguard ballot integrity.