Ken Garcia: Meter plan nearly expired
By: Ken Garcia
Examiner Staff Writer
February 27, 2009
We will see how long the public gets a free ride, but it looks like my personal crusade to stop San Francisco officials from putting parking meters in our parks won’t be futile, at least not right now.
Mayor Gavin Newsom told me this week that he is loath to put meters in Golden Gate Park, at the Palace of Fine Arts and elsewhere, but is still searching for ways to come up with revenue to offset the deep holes in all the city departments’ budgets. And at the Recreation and Park Department, the alternative is to lay off more recreation directors and gardeners — an idea that he hates even more.
Yet, Newsom remembers well the public pounding he took during my last campaign to stop meters from being installed at the Marina Green, and said the number of meters — if any — will be far below the staggering 2,000 recently approved by the Recreation and Park Commission. “I really don’t want to do it,’’ he said. “But people need to see what the trade-offs are. We have a major financial crisis on our hands and we have to think creatively.’’
But there’s nothing creative about parking meters in The City’s prime green spaces — an idea shot down by supervisors in 2003 when they were looking to raise money and came up with the most tired solution available.
Advocates of the meters, such as Jim Lazarus of the Recreation and Park Commission, argue that commuters are parking at unmetered spaces around San Francisco without providing their fair share to city coffers. More than one commissioner has told me anecdotally that a bus run by Google goes to the Marina Green every day to pick up out-of-town workers there.
While I don’t feel the same sense of outrage, there’s a simple solution to stop all-day parking: put in time limits at the spaces. You could make it three or four hours and that would force people not to leave their cars there all day or face the wrath of our notoriously efficient parking-control officers.
The City did that in the east end of Golden Gate Park years ago, right around the time the meter idea
surfaced. Newsom said there still may be some spots that will get meters, but he’ll try to limit them as much as
possible.
Meters may not vote, but very ticked-off (and ticketed) people often do.
Budget talk isn’t exactly steaming up the windows
City Hall is a gloomy place these days. But you’d be in a dark mood too if all anybody wanted to talk about was the budget.
The misery has lots of company. Supervisors are holed up in daylong meetings, closed-door sessions are the rule of the day and the mayor’s desk — normally as neat as his hair — looks like he’s in desperate need of a file clerk.
While the bean counters are looking for about $460 million worth of beans currently missing in action, reporters searching for stories outside the financial realm are finding dry terrain.
Yet, there is some good news about the deficit. For one, we are not going to have to wait until June to be outraged by some necessary cuts, as they’re already upon us. Newsom said he’s going to be presenting his proposed budget to supervisors soon. And for the first time in recent memory, the people residing in fat city are going to find their pensions and health care benefits on the table for discussion — something that should have happened a decade ago.
Did you know that in our fair city if you work one day as a civil-service employee you get guaranteed health insurance for five years? My jaw scraped the pavement on that one, but the overall benefits package to city workers has more pork than the Pentagon.
Civil-service reform is upon us, though it will likely be dragged kicking and screaming through the gilded doors at City Hall.
Race for city attorney over before it started
Just in case you haven’t marked it on your calendar, there is an election for city attorney this November — and so far it’s a one-person race. And it’s very likely to remain that way, since City Attorney Dennis Herrera ran unopposed during the past election cycle and he looks fairly unbeatable again.
To that end, Herrera held his first campaign fundraiser this week, an event at Platinum Advisors that reportedly took in nearly $20,000 — not exactly Obama-like, but plenty enough to announce to any potential challengers that they better get, uh, started.
“I love the job,’’ Herrera told me Thursday. “When you think about a job in the legal profession that has an impact on people’s everyday lives, there’s none better.’’
Except possibly one, the mayor’s job, that opens in 2011. And Herrera, who will almost certainly win his third citywide post this year, is probably better positioned than anyone to succeed Mayor Gavin Newsom, especially if District Attorney Kamala Harris wins her bid for state attorney general.
Herrera wouldn’t bite when I asked him about the race, saying that he’s just concentrating on winning his current job back. But trust me on this, he’s already running.
Peanut gallery shooting from the hip
You know you’re dealing with a tough crowd when pundits wonder whether the honeymoon is over before you actually take office. And now that new polls show that nearly 70 percent of American voters hold the new president in high regard, the other 30 percent want everyone to know they exist.
One conservative blogger sent out a blast e-mail to reporters this week with an opener titled: “One month down, 47 to go.’’ And then it went on to report that President Barack Obama’s disapproval rating had gone up since he took office.
Did he not get the note about the economy? Perhaps it’s comforting to know that President George W. Bush still has some fans out there. And here we thought San Francisco was rough on its politicians. At least now we know what some people are thinking in the harsh world we refer to as those fly-over states.
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