I'll make it clear that I am no fan of Gavin Newsom. Good News for San Francisco residents is that we don't see much of him anymore - he's too busy raising money in La Jolla and sending out tweets.
Dan Noyes of ABC-7 has certainly made a mini-hobby of picking on the Mayor, once getting our big-haired thin-skinned Mayor to stomp out of any interview calling Noyes out for making a cheap shot and telling him he will not speak to him in the future. Sadly for Gavin, Dan Noyes asking him about a supposed drinking problem is a softball compared to what he could expect as Governor.
This week, Noyes discusses San Francisco's budget and layoff situation. And everyone braces for a 33% raise in MUNI fares, for which we get... a service cut.
Gavin talks a very strong game about being a progressive and a liberal. Is that reflected in what is happening in San Francisco?
http://abclocal.go.com/...
While city employees at the bottom fight for their jobs in this tough economy, life at the top is very good. The number of managers in San Francisco city government continues to grow, they are up almost 20 percent since 2005 with 54 new executives hired in just the past year.
"I have concern overall across the whole city about the increase in management disproportionately over front line staff and it's something we need to look at in the budget," says San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos.
Note that Noyes interviews Avalos. He interviews people from Park and Rec. He does not interview Newsom. Is this a function of their long running feud?
Or is it because Gavin is not in the City and is leaving tough problems to the Supervisors, the City suffers, and he runs around raising funds for a Gubernatorial run. It can spun in any number of ways, but the bottom line in my opinion is that the City budget is a mess, the prioritization for spending - directed from the top - is a mess, and Newsom is fiddling while Baghdad by the Bay burns.
In addition to the issue of whether the right prioritization is happening with spending, a bombshell - not totally unexpected - dropped on San Francisco today as MUNI announced a 50 cent increase in bus fares. This is a pretty big deal for a city like San Francisco with so many transit dependent people, as well as people who are definitely NOT transit dependent but who chose to use transit for reasons they value very dearly. Two years ago, the people of San Francisco passed Measure A to increase funding to MUNI, yet the transit agency is in hard times (despite an increase in ridership of transit!), in large part due to work orders that have been used to raid money people voted to go to transit that are now landing in other departments. Again, the work on this issue is being driven by the Board of Supervisors in the absence of the Mayor.
In tough times hard choices need to be made, certainly. And in tough times, leaders show up and lead. In 100 days, President Obama has been a fixture on television and has been engaged in the issues the nation is facing. San Francisco is in crisis mode right now and our Mayor is absent. If "Mayor" is supposed to be a figurehead job, fine - but then I assert that our figurehead Mayor is not qualified to be Governor.
The list goes on. The 49ers want to leave town. The City has not been able to so much as install a bike rack for 3 years due to a lawsuit filed by a crazy gadfly and Newsom has not been able to put the energy and leadership to solve that issue, while in the past 3 years 18 cyclists have been hit at the same intersection, and intersection that also cannot be fixed due to the same lawsuit. Meanwhile Gavin gets on TV and talks about how San Francisco is so green because he is trying to start up a bike sharing program with a whopping 50 bikes and 5 far flung stations - but which won't be ridden on a new bike lane or locked to a new bike rack. Where's the beef?
Even Sarah Palin got Wasilla a new ice rink... and she probably went to all the town council meetings.