Compost goes here, misguided policy goes there

SAN FRANCISCO — Now that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has passed the most stringent recycling laws in the nation, perhaps we can start filling the bins with some of the misguided plans it’s famous for producing.

With our first toss we can start with its inclination toward confusing public policy with social experimentation, as evidenced most recently with a Budget and Finance Committee decision to unilaterally cut hundreds of police officer, firefighter and sheriff’s deputy positions. It’s worth noting that none of the affected departments was contacted by any member of the board before three supervisors decided to bite this enormous chunk from the public-safety network.

This fit of pique amounted to a whopping $82 million reduction in the public-safety budget, and was apparently induced by anger among some super-lefty supervisors because of the mayor’s decision to make deeper cuts in health programs, even though the vast public-health network in San Francisco accounts for about one-third of all city spending.

The great ideological divide that separates the board’s so-called “progressive” majority from a large portion of average citizens was ably summed up by Supervisor David Campos — quickly replacing Supervisor Chris Daly as the panel’s chief polemicist — when he said that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget was perfect only if you happened to be a “wealthy, straight, white male from Pacific Heights.”

Presumably, Campos meant that poor people were being treated inequitably in the budget. But the last time I looked, most of the police services were concentrated on protection in the “communities of color” that he claims to represent, as do many of those paramedic calls that bring people into our public-health system.

And I have a feeling that residents of Hunters Point, Visitacion Valley and Western Addition might have a few things to say if those areas suffered deep public-safety cuts, since those are the neighborhoods often clamoring for a higher-profile police presence.

And since we’re trying to figure out the proper trash receptacles lest we be hit with another fine, perhaps we can also throw out the supervisors’ penchant for trying to derail certain measures at the last minute, much like the way they tried to commandeer Muni’s budget only to realize that it would have greatly jeopardized the transit agency’s entire accounting system.

This was brought to mind by the recent involvement of board President David Chiu into the 14-month process of trying to give the Entertainment Commission new rules in its attempts to crack down on rogue nightclub operators and venues that have a history of violence. Among the numerous amendments Chiu added to the pending legislation was a proposed moratorium on late-night permits, which would have the effect of not controlling nightclub activities, but rather shutting them down.

Chiu’s mysterious decision to throw in a bunch of last-minute changes so upset some commission members that there was talk of dumping the entire package into the junk heap (at 40-plus pages, that paper would be going into the blue recycling bin.) And I only say mysterious because it was not until Monday that Chiu agreed to meet with members of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, which has been the primary negotiator between the many parties involved in drafting the nightclub guidelines.

I think it would be fair to say that without anyone looking, the rookie board members who promised a different, more kind and fuzzy atmosphere at City Hall when they took office have pretty much thrown the idea away. When you bring race-baiting into budget discussions, most people would agree that the gloves are off. The special interests that control district elections have made this board no different than the last.

Perhaps some calm will be restored in the next few weeks. But at this point, it may be that the only police positions that are saved are going to be the ones inspecting our garbage.

Ken Garcia appears Tuesdays and Fridays in The Examiner. Check out his blog at sfexaminer.com/opinion or e-mail him at kgarcia@sfexaminer.com.