JUST A WEEK or so after Mayor Willie Brown announced he wants to get rid of the elected school board and make it into a mayor-appointed commission, he demonstrated exactly why that's such a bad idea.

The Redevelopment Commission – made up of mayoral appointees – has been debating the future of the Plaza, a rundown hotel on Howard Street. Plenty of neighborhood and affordable housing advocates think that the nonprofit Tenants and Owners Development Corporation, which has a good record of building housing South of Market, should renovate and run the hotel. But Brown has decided he wants the agency to do it on its own – and he's instructed his commissioners to go along with that idea.

But as Cassi Feldman reports on page 13, commissioner Mark Dunlop wasn't so sure - in fact, he told the San Francisco Examiner in an interview published Feb. 17 that he thinks Brown's approach is wrong and that maybe the Board of Supervisors should have more control over the agency.

Brown called Dunlop at home that day and told him he'd be fired if he didn't recant his comments.

Is that how Brown would like to run the San Francisco schools? Like a private fiefdom where only the interests of the mayor and his cronies matter and there's no room for dissent?

And just think about who would end up on the board: campaign contributors (think Don Fisher of the Gap, who wants to privatize public schools through Edison Corp., which his son helps run) and political hacks who can't get jobs anywhere else and use the job as a way to shovel contracts to their friends. Just what the schools need.

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The Bay Guardian has dedicated its Feb. l3, 2002, issue (whose cover story was "Burying the '60s with the "T" word"), to Darrell Oldham, a founder and former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. He died Saturday of lung cancer in a Seattle hospice with his family at his side.

Oldham was a pioneer and pillar of the alternative press movement: a cofounder and former associate publisher of the Seattle Weekly, a founder of AAN, the chief organizer of the first AAN conference in Seattle in l978, the second president of AAN, and the AAN executive who started the national advertising movement, inside and outside AAN, that helped provide the revenue to fuel the hopes and dreams of the l960s in successful alternative papers throughout the country.

For more information on Oldham go to aan.org/gbase/Aan/newsByDate.