November 27, 2002

Hall Monitor

Big budget crunch: Controller Ed Harrington has informed the supervisors that, as bad as officials thought this year's financial situation would be, it's actually worse. So far 2002-03 revenues are already $20 million short.

That makes the defeat of Proposition L even more disheartening to city officials. Prop. L would have brought in $30 million by raising the transaction fees on real estate sales worth more than $1 million. Though it would have mainly affected owners of property in the Financial District and Pacific Heights, the more than half-million-dollar campaign against it, largely funded by the Building and Owners Management Association, convinced voters it would raise everybody's taxes.

For its part, BOMA doesn't have any ideas for funding the shortfall. "As far as short-term measures, I really don't know," BOMA's Ken Cleaveland said, adding that in the long run the city needs to cut its huge number of employees and make its services more efficient. "We have to look at scaling back so that when we do have difficult budget times it's not so difficult and painful to constrict."

In the meantime, city departments have been asked to cut 3 percent out of this year's budget and anticipate trimming at least 7 percent for the next fiscal cycle. (Blackwell)

Soft money melts: Apparently, the soft-money jockeys who in 2000 funneled nearly $1 million into machine candidates' campaigns didn't see fit to do the same in this November's election.

Two years ago the Committee on Jobs and its sister PAC, San Franciscans for Sensible Government, collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from about 30 of the biggest downtown firms. And with the help of political consulting firm Barnes Mosher Whitehurst Lauter and Partners, the PACs steered the soft money into the campaign efforts of such political luminaries as the Rev. Amos Brown, Chris Dittenhafer, Tom Hsieh Jr., Juanita Owens, Mabel Teng, and Michael Yaki, each running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

The idea was to repeat the process used to get Mayor Willie Brown reelected in 1999.

But with the return of district elections that year, it failed miserably. None of those candidates got elected.

This year downtown's soft-money coffers stayed shut. Independent expenditures amounted to only $40,000 – and most of that was labor money for District Eight's progressive supervisor candidate Eileen Hansen.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Ethics Commission expects the advent of instant runoff voting to dampen soft-money efforts even further. IRV is expected to be in place in time for the 2003 mayor's race. Since voters will be asked to pick their second and third choices for mayor, it won't be in any candidate's interests for independent expenditures to go to trashing other contenders. That means it wouldn't make sense, say, for current supervisor Gavin Newsom to go negative on moderate challenger and current treasurer Susan Leal – nor for former supervisor Angela Alioto to slam current supervisor Tom Ammiano.

There's been some question as to whether the Department of Elections will have the equipment ready to handle the new system within one year. But Steven Hill, of the Center for Voting and Democracy and coauthor of the IRV initiative (which was approved by voters last March), says the department has no choice.

"If they don't do it by then, they'll be in violation of the charter," Hill said. "The grace period is over." (Savannah Blackwell)

KPOO poo-poohed? Diamond Dave, a KPOO-FM radio jockey, has alerted Sup. Matt Gonzalez that his successful move to change the Board of Supervisors' regular meetings from Monday to Tuesday will jeopardize the radio station's ability to broadcast the weekly meetings live. In late September the supervisors approved Gonzalez's request – though only Gonzalez was really gung ho about the move. Since KPOO has a contract requiring the station to broadcast the Redevelopment Agency's meetings on Tuesday afternoons, it can't also cover the board's meetings.