Organized Labor

In getting projects approved and members to work we count as usual allies on the Board of Supervisors Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, Bevan Dufty, and Sean Elsbernd. These four were steady in supporting Lennar’s project at Hunters and Candlestick Points, a project that means twenty years of work for us. We owe them thanks.Our greatest gratitude for Board approval of the project belongs of course to Sophie Maxwell, who from her arrival there until now just before her last term’s end has shepherded the project through the screes and scarps, the high passes and deep gorges of City Hall.

In the last weeks of the project’s approval, though, the central role fell to Board of Supervisors President David Chiu.

I criticized Chiu directly two months ago, in my May column on the Board action that killed the project at 555 Washington.

It takes six votes to win on the eleven-member Board, however. Alioto-Pier, Chu, Dufty, Elsbernd, and Maxwell make five.

A coalition of San Francisco Labor Council, San Francisco Organizing Project, and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment signed a Community Benefits Agreement with Lennar. Among other things, the agreement provided for increased but achievable levels of affordable housing, for workforce training funds, and for priority in obtaining housing to “certificate of preference” holders displaced by earlier Redevelopment projects. The coalition pledged to support the project.

Labor Council President Mike Casey, Executive Director Tim Paulson, Vice President Connie Ford, and I went searching, then, for a sixth vote among the Board’s so-called “Progressives.”

We decided the likeliest candidates for this vote and maybe more were Supervisors Chiu, Campos, and Mirkarimi. We talked to all three and as far as possible identified their issues with the project. We brokered meetings between them and Lennar.

In a July meeting of the Board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee, comprised of Supervisors Maxwell, Mar, and Chiu and chaired by Maxwell, we had our first indication of success. The Committee was considering adopting findings on the project’s environmental impacts and approving various technical measures, some amending codes and plans, some concerning zoning.

Supervisor Chiu presented a list of additional proposed amendments. Supervisor Maxwell seconded them. As she was the project’s leading proponent on the Board, her second told us Chiu’s proposals would work and he would vote for the project. I glanced across the room at Lennar’s representatives. Some were nodding.

Subsequently at the full Board Chiu’s proposals received their required first reading. There, too, the Board rejected an appeal to the Environmental Impact Report that, if successful, would have set the project back many months and probably killed it. The vote was 8-3. Chiu, Campos, and Mirkarimi, the Supervisors we had courted, joined the five on whose support we had already counted. Supervisors Daly, Mar, and Avalos backed the appeal.

Chiu’s proposals received their second reading at the next meeting of the full Board, July 27, along with the technical measures.

In the meantime we heard that environmental groups had threatened that if he continued to support the project he would never again in his political career receive an environmental endorsement. In San Francisco and in California this could mean political death.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian had also opposed the project consistently. By defying this non-union newspaper so influential over “Progressive” politicians Chiu again risked alienating many of the voters who had elected him and whom he would need in future elections.

When the project came before the Board July 27 Supervisor Chris Daly proposed an amendment that would have required fifty percent affordable housing and so made the project economically impossible.

Daly’s amendment was defeated 6-5. Chiu was the deciding vote.

Supervisor Mirkarimi then proposed an amendment to eliminate the proposed bridge over Yosemite Slough from the project. This would have made public, bicycle, and pedestrian transit between the Hunters Point and Candlestick Point halves more time-consuming and difficult and the project harder thereby to finance, and so would have condemned it to a slow ugly demise.

Mirkarimi’s amendment died 6-5. Chiu again was the difference.

The Board minutes do not reflect it, but my notes and those of Tim Paulson show another 6-5 vote that preserved the project, this one against a Daly amendment that would have prohibited use of fossil fuels in heating project buildings. Chiu was one of the six who defeated the prohibition, which was broad enough to have banned even electricity from natural-gas-fired plants.

The final vote on the project went 10-1 in favor, only Daly remaining opposed. This is the vote most Board members will cite when they ask us for future endorsements. The real story is clearly not theirs.

Former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin was quoted in the New York Times recently as calling David Chiu “weak.” In the July 27 Board meeting he showed how strong and gutsy he was, and this on our behalf.

I told him I would not forget. None of us should.