With tech firms seemingly the beneficiary of much of the love coming out of City Hall these days, small businesses feel somewhat neglected in the wake of the realization that a voter-mandated report on how to make life easier on them is now years past due.
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Supervisor John Avalos is going straight to the people in an effort to inject excitement into the monthly question time sessions with Mayor Ed Lee.
“I’ve been a bit underwhelmed with QT so I thought I’d mix it up and troll for QT from my FB friends,” Avalos wrote on his Facebook page. “Please submit QT questions — serious ones or not — for my staff and me to choose from.”
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New life could be injected into the monthly snooze-fests at which the Board of Supervisors can ask the mayor questions.
In November 2010, voters approved Proposition C, which required The City to hold a monthly question time session but left the rules up to the board and the mayor. While most observers apparently viewed these monthly exercises as boring and scripted, it took until Tuesday to prompt serious calls for change.
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The quaint practice known as “question time,” in which the Board of Supervisors has a chance to grill the mayor, started with a whimper and never picked up speed.
And as of today, participation drops to an all-time low, with just one question submitted for Mayor Ed Lee to answer. Seen by some as a boring waste of time, the voter-mandated Q&A session between the legislative and executive branch will have the shortest run time in its history.
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Small-business owners know City Hall can be a pain, but it appears overdue relief is on the way.When voters approved Proposition I in November 2007, it created the Small Business Office with an assistance center to focus on the needs of San Francisco companies that have fewer than 100 employees. It also required that the office submit within four months of opening a report on how to make life easier for small-business owners to obtain permits, pay annual fees and the like.
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Like most people not named Ed Lee, Supervisor John Avalos appears to be a long shot in the race to become San Francisco’s next mayor. But Avalos expressed confidence Tuesday that he’d claim a landslide victory against Lee in a round of pingpong.
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“Mayor’s question time is this Tuesday,” I mentioned to my friend as I perused the Board of Supervisors agenda for today’s meeting. “Oh, you mean that thing where Mayor Lee shows up at the board with scripted responses to scripted questions and doesn’t really tell us anything?” my friend said. “That’s the one!”
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Scripted and devoid of political excitement, the first-ever question-and-answer session between the mayor and supervisors Tuesday was about 30 minutes of straight policy talk.No one raised their voices, no one made any attacks and there was no criticism. It was nothing like the “gotcha” moment critics of the ballot initiative had warned about when it was first proposed during the era of former Supervisor Chris Daly and ex-Mayor Gavin Newsom.
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Most of new San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s challenges are well-known, from having to close a budget deficit to preparing for the 2013 America’s Cup sailing race. But one of his challenges has been largely overlooked: Lee will be the first mayor in history to have to appear before members of the Board of Supervisors every month to answer questions they have for him.
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It’s no surprise that President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was a snooze: the speech has long been a dull and pompous ritual. But no one was bored two days later when the president showed up to a House Republican confab in Baltimore for a lively, unscripted tussle with his opponents.
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