Plus: Text messages and public records — and why is Ed Lee headlining the City College commencement?
By Tim Redmond
MAY 22, 2015 – Former Sup. Aaron Peskin is the first to the finish line in the race to file signatures to make it onto the November ballot. Peskin will file the last of more than 1,000 signatures at noon today, enough to qualify him for the District Three race.
Supervisor Julie Christensen, the incumbent, has been collecting signatures but hasn’t reached the threshold yet. It’s pretty clear that she will, but the Peskin campaign is celebrating its early finish.
“We have been out in every part of the district,” Nate Allbee, Peskin’s campaign manager, told me.
Gathering signatures for a campaign like this isn’t just about qualifying for the ballot; it’s an organizing technique. You get 1,000 people to say they want you on the ballot, and that’s potentially your first 1,000 votes.
The big news earlier this week was the scoop by my friend Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, who obtained text messages showing that the Mayor’s Office contacted a planning commission member during a meeting and told her to change her vote on Airbnb.
That’s not surprising – we know this mayor likes to run a tight ship and tell everyone how to vote. There’s been some discussion of past mayors doing the same thing (except that Willie Brown knew better than to leave any kind of paper or electronic trail).
But there are two interesting points to be made here. The first is that the voters changed the rules for Planning Commission members a few years ago, in the wake of Brown firing Commissioner Dennis Antenore when he refused to side with the mayor on a major policy issue.
The City Charter now gives members of that panel fixed four-year terms; they can only be removed for cause. The reason: Commissioners were supposed to have the independence to (on occasion) disagree with the person who appointed them.
It is, Antenore says, a quasi-judicial body. And the rules were changed “precisely to permit commissioners to act according to their best judgement and based upon the contents of public hearings.”
In other words, if the mayor tells the commissioners how to vote before they even listen to testimony, what is the point of a public hearing? Why bother listening to all the people who show up and wait for hours to make the case for or against a policy or decision if the mayor has already settled the matter in a back room?
The other interesting element: As far as I know, this is the first instance in which the city has agreed that text messages, probably sent to or from a personal cell phone, count as public records.
Fitzgerald Rodriguez argued that cell phone texts sent or received during the course of business – and clearly, a commission meeting is the course of business – ought to be public. The city attorney agreed.
This is potentially a huge precedent.
The City College graduation ceremony is this afternoon, and it should all be about the grads and their families and no politics and all that … But everything involving City College is political right now, and the two people keynoting up on the podium will be … Larry Baer, the CEO of the SF Giants, and Mayor Ed Lee.
Okay, I get Baer. He’s a fourth-generation San Franciscan, the leader of a very successful local sports franchise, the kind of person you want to give a commencement address.
But Ed Lee? The guy who refused to support City College at first, who we are told is trying to delay the return to local control …. WTF is he doing there?
Just asking.
