Reject Ben Hom

Mayor Willie Brown's astonishing move to nominate Ben Hom to the San Francisco Port Commission is a direct challenge to the city's Board of Supervisors: Hom represents exactly the sort of corruption that board president Matt Gonzalez and his progressive colleagues have vowed to fight. If the supervisors approve Hom, it would send a terrible signal, not only that they are unwilling to stand up to the mayor but also that it's still business as usual, Brown style, at city hall.

Hom, a real estate broker and investor, was such a sleazy operator that he was removed from the Redevelopment Agency for official misconduct in 1993 by then mayor Frank Jordan. Hom, Jordan ruled, had solicited political contributions from a developer who had business before the agency. Hom was also charged with trying to pressure the agency staff into depositing $100,000 in agency funds in a bank owned by some of his friends and pushing staff to give a contract and two parking-lot rental agreements to other friends.

In 1999, Brown gave Hom (who has contributed to Brown's mayoral campaigns) a second political life, naming him to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. He didn't last long, resigning under pressure after voting to authorize the SFPUC to negotiate a lease on a building in which he had a financial interest.
City law bars anyone convicted of official misconduct from ever again holding local office, and that should disqualify Hom. But he slipped through a legal loophole in 1993, when then-city attorney Louise Renne ruled that the misconduct statute doesn't apply to members of the Redevelopment Agency Commission, since Redevelopment is technically a state agency. That's a silly ruling, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera should overturn it and tell the supervisors to not even consider this nomination.

But whatever the fine print of the law, Hom's record makes it clear that he can't be trusted with a city commission post.

At the same time, Benny Yee, a Brown ally who has used his post as a redevelopment commissioner to fight ethics reform, fight nonprofit housing developers, attack community-based groups like Asian Neighborhood Design (which Yee considers too liberal), and hand lucrative deals to dubious contractors, is up for reappointment. He doesn't deserve the job, either.

There are hundreds of highly qualified Asian community leaders in San Francisco; it's a civic embarrassment that Brown is pushing these two, both of them allies of the big developers who have tried so hard to wreck San Francisco. The Board of Supervisors’ Rules Committee, which meets Feb. 26, should kill both nominations, and if it doesn't, the board as a whole should reject them.