Nato’s Endorsements for the SF 2018 Ballot
Voting has begun in California, so it’s that time of year when everyone I know who only pays attention to a few races suddenly realizes how much shit is on the ballot and asks me how to vote on all of it.
Some sentimental nerds will tell you that you should vote no matter what. I disagree. If you are going to vote my priorities, you should definitely vote. If you are going to vote the wrong way, then I hope you feel no urgency about voting whatsoever.
HIGHLIGHTS I feel most strongly about. Use this as a cheat sheet, longer descriptions below, and endorsements for stuff I don’t care as much about. If you vote no on 10 and C, or you’re in District 6 and don’t vote for Matt Haney, or in District 4 and don’t vote for Gordon Mar, never talk to me again.
Statewide: Tony Thurmond for Superintendent of Public Instruction, Lara for Insurance Commissioner.
State Props: Big YES on Props 1, 2, 3, 4, and 10. Big NO on Prop 5, 6, and 11.
San Francisco: Supervisors Mar, Haney, Mandelman, Walton.
SF props: Big YES on A, C & D.
General principles — I support new revenue for public services, but I like taxes better than bonds, which are debt for children, who have enough problems. I like progressive taxes better than regressive ones, although I also like diversifying the tax base and don’t want our entire government dependent on rich people staying rich. I like unrestricted new revenue for the general fund and dislike set-asides. Make legislators, the people with the power of the purse, do their dumb jobs. Despite those preferences, I almost always vote for new taxes or bonds because we need the stuff it pays for more than the perfect policy.
Also, generally, I support progressive unity. In San Francisco, look to the League of Pissed Off Voters with the best-written guide in town, the Harvey Milk Club, the Tenants Union, SF Rising, the teachers, the nurses, and SEIU Local 1021 to discern an emergent progressive consensus. Here’s more background info on the state props from CalMatters. Also the Oakland Rising Action Fund is good.
On statewide races, I’m voting mostly a straight Democratic ticket, so I’ll only write explanations when I have anything extra to say.
· United States Senator: Kevin de Leon. Thanks to California’s top-two primary, this is hot Dem on Dem action, so there’s really no greater evil to worry about. I can vote my conscience. Unless something unexpected occurs, Dianne Feinstein will win re-election. I’m not into old white millionaires controlling the fate of the Democratic Party, so I’m going to vote for DeLeon to support normalizing primary challenges from the left to incumbent powerful Democrats. When the IPCC report came out this week warning of the need for urgent action to fucking save civilization from catastrophic climate change, Dianne Feinstein’s twitter feed didn’t mention it and Kevin DeLeon hammered it nonstop. Climate votes say DeLeon.
· California Insurance Commissioner: Ricardo Lara vs Steve Poizner. This and the Superintendent of Public Instruction are the two genuinely contested statewide races that are really important. Poizner is a pre-Trump era Republican who decided to run as an independent this time. The Insurance Commissioner is responsible for regulating car insurance and healthcare PPOs, and having someone who believes in consumers and in regulation is vitally important. Lara has been a single payer healthcare champion in the legislature.
· California Superintendent of Public Instruction: Tony Thurmond vs Marshall Tuck. Nominally this is another Dem on Dem race. Tony Thurmond has been a legislator from the East Bay with an unimpeachable record of progressive voting and legislating. Marshall Tuck has the unabashed backing of the charter school industry and is generally a dick. Charter schools are bad, for reasons I discussed in my column in 2016.
· Congress: Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi has already ruled out impeaching Brett Kavanugh, despite perjury and secrecy and the like. Nancy Pelosi is often to the right of her own party, and often to the American people as a whole. But I don’t see any reason other than juvenile indignation to not vote for her.
· California Governor: Gavin Newsom. Sigh. I guess. I don’t want a Republican, but Newsom is weak. It’s not just his politics. Newsom has always been only about Newsom, Inc. He has never stood up to corporate power in his career. He’s not interested in the job of Governor any more than he was interested in Lieutenant Governor. He will immediately begin preparing to run for President or Senate. He has no skill or attention span for the work of negotiating with the legislature to pull off difficult two-thirds votes. Even when I didn’t like all his choices, Governor Brown was good at the job. Newsom will be good for the press. The best hope is that he will to have Big Bold Ideas to Make a Difference that people can exploit.
· California Lt. Governor: Eleni Kounalakis.
· California Attorney General: Xavier Becerra.
· California Secretary of State: Alex Padilla
· California Controller: Betty Yee
· California Treasurer: Fiona Ma
Since term limits, there’s been a musical chairs of politicians running for office to stay employed until running for the next office. Board of Equalization is a cush political patronage gig. Malia Cohen got termed out of the Board of Supervisors and is running for Board of Equalization. I don’t even know what the Board of Equalization does, but I’m fairly certain that Cohen isn’t running because of her deep personal commitment to the mission of that body, whatever it is. It’s a place for her to park herself on a taxpayer salary until her next move.
· Board of Equalization 2: Malia Cohen
Ballot Measures
· Prop 1: $4B Bond for Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond: YES. Affordable housing. Duh. It’s a drop in the bucket to meet the need, but we need the drop.
· Prop 2: Allow Previous Bond Money to Be Used for Homeless Housing: YES. Allocates $2 billion of existing bond money to fund supportive housing for those suffering with mental illness.
· Prop 3: $8.9B Bond for Water Projects: YES
· Prop 4: $1.5B Bond for Children’s Hospitals: YES.
· Prop 5: Expand Prop 13 for Property Owners: NO. The demons at the real estate industry put this on the ballot to expand Prop 13 for certain people to carry their Prop 13 tax rates to new homes. It would cost the state one BILLION dollars a year in lost revenue. That alone is a reason to vote against. I’m in favor of a comprehensive reform of Prop 13, and am open to ideas about how to make life easier for cash-poor/house-rich homeowners, but it has to result in more tax revenue, not less.
· Prop 6: Eliminate Gas Tax: NO. Governor Brown wheeled and dealt to get a 2/3 vote on a gas tax increase to fund a lot of good transportation improvements and public works. The GOP thought putting a repeal on the ballot would help their turnout in blue California, where they’ve been reduced to a sputtering mob of irrelevant AM radio personalities. Even though the gas tax is a regressive tax, facing the reality of climate change, people need to stop driving, and also, it funds good stuff we need.
· Prop 7: Eliminate Daylight Saving Time: Look, I don’t care at all.
· Prop 8: Regulation of Kidney Dialysis Charges: YES. This whole situation is a gross byproduct of our market-based healthcare system and a poster child of why we need single payer health care. Dialysis is an expensive treatment for anyone with kidney failure. In the 1970s, Congress decided that anyone who needed it could get Medicare BUT they capped the payments to providers. More background on this in ProPublica. The result of the cap is that heath care systems contract dialysis to a small monopoly of for-profit companies that make money based on, as usual, cutting costs. Prop 8 seeks to cap the profit about costs these companies can earn, to discourage their incentive to cut corners on patient safety.
· Prop 10: Allow Expansion of Rent Control! YES. This repeals the 1995 Costa-Hawkins Act, which limits what kind of rent control can be passed at the local level. With many California cities leading the nation as the most expensive and unaffordable, with rents rising far faster than incomes, with small rent hikes causing homelessness, WE NEED THIS NOW. Passing Prop 10 doesn’t automatically do anything; it just allows local governments to make stronger rent control laws. I’ve written about this, for example here and here. Prop 10 allows local governments to expand rent control to condos, to buildings built after 1979 (in the case of SF), to single family homes, to create vacancy control between renters. Nobody thinks rent control is the entire answer to the housing crisis, but it is literally the only policy on the table that can stop people being displaced right away. Every other proposal to tackle the housing crisis being floated takes 5–30 years for relief to arrive. Communities being displaced now don’t have that kind of time. Let’s pass rent control and get on to the long-term solutions.
· Prop 11: Require Private Ambulances to Remain on Call During Work Breaks: NO. Private ambulance companies want workers to stay “on call” during the breaks that they are legally entitled to. This issue came up a lot when I was doing union work with hospital workers. If you’re on call, it’s not a break. You can’t go outside. You can’t take a nap. You can’t take your pants off. The stuff that breaks are for. And, if you are on call, it means that you get called back and lose your break. This just makes it easy for ambulance companies to understaff so they don’t have to cover breaks. Do you want a sleepy EMT who needs to go to the bathroom taking your emergency call?
· Prop 12: New Standards for Confinement of Farm Animals: No position.
SF Supervisors:
District 2. Nah, I’m good. (District 2 is the Marina and Pacific Heights.) It’s an affluent moderate district, with the most Republican voters in town. I don’t have high hopes for any supervisor from the district. Incumbent Catherine Stefani’s main challenger is Nick Josefowitz, who is financing his own campaign, and spent $400,000 of his own money on a ballot measure that did not qualify to prevent former Supervisor Alioto-Pier from running (trying to pick his adversary), and is facing ethics charges because his mother-in-law is financing a PAC to attack Stefani. We don’t need more entitled rich guys in politics. Stefani and I became friends when we worked together on the CPMC project back when she was an aide to Supervisor Alioto-Pier. But she’s endorsed by the SF POA, who are the biggest obstacle to police reform, and indeed the cause of a lot of problems with racist policing, so I can’t endorse anyone who’s endorsed by them.
District 4 Gordon Mar. (D4 is the Sunset.) When Katy Tang abruptly decided not to run for re-election, there was an unexpected rush where possible candidates had a week to pull papers to fill the void. This one’s a no-brainer for me. I started working with Gordon in 2003 on the original minimum wage campaign when he was at Chinese Progressive Association and I was at Young Workers United. Gordon has always been a high-outcome, low-ego kind of leader, incredible at bringing people together, forging consensus around tough issues, and fighting hard for a principled position. Between CPA and Jobs With Justice, Gordon has had a hand in every immigrant rights and labor rights struggle in San Francisco since forever. He’s the first strong candidate we’ve ever had from this district.
The corporate/cop money is for current Supervisor Tang’s aide Jessica Ho, a youngster who moved to the district a few months ago. When Fiona Ma left the Board of Supervisors to go to the Assembly in 2006 was the last open election for the district. Ed Jew won, then went to jail, and the Mayor appointed Carmen Chu, who served until she was elected Assessor and then the Mayor appointed Katy Tang. Now the same people are trying to anoint Jessica Ho. Seems like the district would benefit from getting to pick its own supervisor.
Besides the unpardonable sin of not attending Lincoln High School or eating at Doggie Diner or ditching school to smoke menthols in Stern Grove, she flip-flopped on San Francisco’s sanctuary policy. That would be bad for anyone who had read the news in a post-11/9 world, but even worse for someone whose only qualification for public office is working in City Hall. It’s literally impossible to set foot in City Hall, even to deliver flowers, without a nuanced pro-sanctuary stance.
District 6 Matt Haney. (D6 is the Tenderloin, SOMA, and Treasure Island.) Jane Kim’s seat is up for grabs. There are bad candidates who need to be stopped. Sonja Trauss, the Jim Jones mother of the YIMBY movement and Christine Johnson, the former Planning Commissioner who changed her vote on a key Airbnb regulation because the Mayor’s office told her too. Trauss and Johnson are getting a bunch of outside spending from the POA and a who’s who of dicey corporate interests. The POA consultant Gary Delagnaes said the union supported them because, “they were both very, very adamant that more people needed to go to jail, that more people needed to be prosecuted.”
On the other hand Matt Haney is great. He’s got a solid record of championing community issues from the School Board. He has the support of the breadth of the political spectrum, from establishment players like Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party to Alicia Garza and SF Rising. His district has caught the brunt of development and is ground zero for the crisis of addiction and homelessness. We need a supervisor who will tackle problems with compassion and courage, and not assume every problem can be solved with more police.
District 8 Rafael Mandelman (D8 is the Castro, Noe Valley, Glen Park.) Vote for Rafael because he’s running unopposed, we’re friends from high school, and he’s great.
District 10 (Bayview Hunter’s Point, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, Visitation Valley) Shamann Walton, Tony Kelly. Shamann Walton has been on the School Board and the unions that had to deal with him in that capacity endorsed him. Even SF Rising’s coalition of working class community of color organizations endorsed him. I haven’t agreed with every policy position he’s ever had. For example, he supported Proposition O in 2016, to lift the cap from the 1980s on office construction so that Lennar could accelerate construction in the shipyard. While I disagree with the position, a lot of other people I like also supported Prop O, because they wanted the shipyard development to be successful. This is a disagreement that I can have with someone and stay on the same side. On the other hand, supporting a black guy with a base in the district with a decent track record of actual work is the right thing to do. Tony is a good progressive and I like him. The DSA supports him. Either one of them would be an improvement. But progressives in San Francisco have been criticized, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, for not promoting people of color in leadership and this is a district race where we have a chance to fix that.
Measure A: YES — the Embarcadero Seawall Earthquake Safety Bond finances the construction, reconstruction, acquisition, improvement, and seismic strengthening of the Embarcadero Seawall. Climate change is upon us. We’re a peninsula. They’re building a bunch of shit along the Bay. Fixing up the sea wall seems like the least we can do to prepare.
Measure B: Yes. It’s a statement of principles about digital privacy. We need this.
Measure C: YES. Most important local measure. Creates the “Our City, Our Home Fund” to house 4,000 homeless people, expand shelter beds by 1,000 in five years, and fund intensive mental health and substance abuse services to move the City’s most severely impaired individuals off the streets by enacting a small tax on businesses making more than $50 million a year. Duh. The biggest businesses pay the tax, they just got a tax cut from Trump, and it’s a chance to make a real dent in what everyone says is the City’s biggest problem. And we get to stick it to a bunch of tech shitheads.
Measure D: YES- places a gross receipts tax on cannabis businesses. Yes to new revenue. Hopefully generating a lot of tax revenue off legal weed will help more legalization, and get more people out of jail.
Measure E: YES — directs a portion of the funds generated by the existing hotel tax to arts and cultural organizations and projects. I wish arts funding supported comedians, but this is still good. Years and years ago, part of the hotel tax was supposed to fund community arts and it got poached for the general fund by Mayor Brown. This fixes that. More funding for whatever artists can still afford to live in SF.
SAN FRANCISCO UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT (SFUSD)
This is an election with something like 18 candidates for 3 open spots. There are more than three progressives running. And there are real problems out there. Josephine Zhao is still on the ballot and people are still campaigning for her, even though she officially dropped out for her transphobic comments. There are other candidates getting significant backing from the charter school industry, which, again, is trying to open up more of San Francisco public schools to privatization. Finally, because so many candidates have launched successful races for the Board of Supervisors from the School Board, increasingly it seems like people are running for school board as a stepping stone more than because they care especially about the schools.
So basically, on this, I defer to UESF and SEIU Local 1021. The unions that have to deal with the school board the most have the most reliable opinion about who will be good for school board. Vote for:
Alison Collins, Faauuga Moliga, and Li-Miao Lovett.
City College Board
Thea Selby, Brigitte Davila, John Rizzo
BART District 8 Director: Janice Li
Other races:
· State Assembly, District 15: Jovanka Beckles
· State Assembly, District 17: David Chiu
· State Assembly, District 18: Rob Bonta
· State Assembly, District 19: Phil Ting
