Hall's crazy crackdown

IT'S HARD TO know where to begin with Sup. Tony Hall's bizarre plan to make peaceful protesters pay to have the local cops monitor and arrest them. His proposed legislation (see "Protesters Pay," 4/16/03) is obviously a direct and almost certainly unconstitutional assault on free speech. There's no way it could be fairly enforced (if the costs of police action in a protest come from fining those arrested, won't the cops have even more incentive to make needless arrests that clog up the courts and cost the city even more money)? The numbers don't even add up: creating a mandatory cash bail of $1,000 for anyone arrested for blocking the streets would pack the already overcrowded county jails, costing the city far more than it could ever recover in fines.

And it would send a terrible message to the rest of the country, putting San Francisco on the side of the Bush administration in the ongoing crackdown on dissent.

In fact, the whole thing only validates the ass-backward approach the police department took to the demonstrations in the first place. There were too many cops making too many arrests for no good or valid reason. Everyone in town knew that some other key downtown areas were going to be occupied by protesters; the cops could have simply blocked those areas off to traffic and let people take over the streets for a day or two. That would have caused less disruption, cost the city far less money, and made a whole lot more fiscal and political sense.

But there's a larger problem with this concept, something Hall should have to explain and answer for. The city's budget crisis is to a significant extent the result of Bush's war and his obsession with cutting taxes on the rich and on big business – that's what's wrecking the economy, reducing travel and tourism, and ensuring there's not enough federal aid to cities. The protesters calling attention to those problems are the ones who are trying to turn the mess around. If Hall is really worried about the city budget deficit, he ought to be going out of his way to endorse and support antiwar activity.

He and the other supervisors should also be looking for creative ways to close the city's $347 million budget gap by raising taxes on those who have been the biggest beneficiaries of the Bush largesse: big downtown businesses that have seen their federal tax rates fall radically in the past two years and defense contractors like Bechtel Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., which are already reaping the financial windfalls from the Iraq invasion.

That's a tricky prospect: state law severely limits new local taxes, and while it may be emotionally appealing, there's no legal (or practical, or fair) way to charge the likes of Bechtel for the costs of having the police keep protesters from disrupting business. But the top of the political agenda this budget season ought to be making downtown pay its fair share – and a good way to start would be an immediate moratorium on any more tax abatements, concessions, or incentives for big businesses and an end to all of the sweetheart no-bid contracts some of these same companies have been getting from the city (Bechtel is a good example). Another key issue: moving as quickly as possible on public power, which would bring in huge sums of money. The supervisors should also move to raise Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s franchise fee. And the new assessor-recorder, Mabel Teng, needs to fight vigorously against every assessment appeal on a big downtown building.

Instead, Hall – who supported PG&E's illegal and expensive monopoly, which is costing the local economy $620 million a year – wants to stick it to the protesters, who are standing up for and demonstrating everything that's right about San Francisco. The supervisors should reject the idea with extreme prejudice. And it should provide a great issue for someone to begin organizing to unseat Hall in 2004.