Parkmerced Agreement Illegally Excluded Public

By Hope Johnson, Chair, Sunshine Ordinance Task Force

Lurking in the darkest corners of San Francisco's Parkmerced Development Agreement is the question of enforceability of the agreement's rent control provision. The elusive answer remains shadowed in odd mystery, and the Board of Supervisors has done little to shed much needed light on the controversial issue.

Can the City require replacement of existing rent controlled housing scheduled for demolition?

California's Costa-Hawkins Act prevents local regulations from requiring rent control on new construction. Rent control on the new apartments might make the project economically impractical.

But the City Attorney's Office position is that rent control is part of the contract, and there is no reason to believe the contract will be violated or challenged. Despite that assurance, the Board of Supervisors spent several hours discussing the enforceability question during its March 29, 2011 hearing on appeal of the Planning Commission's 4-3 vote approval of the environmental impact report.

The Board ultimately chose to continue their decision on the appeal to May 24th to allow time to consider the oddly mysterious legal standing of the City to enforce such a condition.

Meanwhile, the Parkmerced Development Agreement itself was assigned to the Board's Land Use Committee for May 16, 2011. Committee Chair Eric Mar opened the meeting by explaining that, because the item had been improperly noticed, no action could be taken—the item would be continued to the committee's May 24th hearing.

Supervisor Sean Elsbernd introduced "technical amendments" to the agreement. Discussion ensued, including enforceability of the rent control provision and Chair Mar's concern that energy consumption might need revision. Members of the public were provided copies of the revised agreement and were told it would be available online later that day.

The newly introduced amendments were then approved by the committee, notwithstanding Chair Mar's repeated declaration that no action would be taken on the agreement until May 24th.

One week later, on May 24th, two separate meetings were scheduled that involved approval of the Parkmerced project, one was the Land Use Committee's continued discussion at 9 am and the other was the regularly scheduled meeting of the full Board of Supervisors later that same day at 2 pm. The Land Use Committee was to make a referral on the agreement to the Board. The Board was then scheduled to vote on approval of both the Parkmerced environmental impact report and the Development Agreement itself.

At the May 24th Land Use Committee, a brief presentation of the amendments previously introduced at the May 16th hearing was provided. Then Supervisor David Chiu introduced fourteen pages of new amendments specifically directed at tenants' rights—the murky subject at issue for two months. These new amendments were not mentioned at the beginning of the hearing or at the meeting one week prior.

Supervisor Chiu said he and city attorney Charles Sullivan had stayed awake all night working on the amendments and Supervisor Cohen, a member of the committee, admitted she had only had about one hour to review the newly introduced amendments. Chair Mar expressed concern with a lack of transparency and that approval of the amendments would constitute a violation of Sunshine Ordinance public comment requirements.

The city attorney told the committee the agenda description of the Development Agreement was broad enough to encompass Chiu's amendments. The amendments were approved, leaving only a few hours for the public to review and comment on amendments to a contract provision the Board had allowed itself two months to review. Several hours later on the same day, the Development Agreement was approved by the full Board.

On June 20, 2011, an anonymous complaint was filed with the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force against Supervisor Mar for alleged violations of the Sunshine Ordinance.

The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force concluded that the last minute introduction of fourteen pages of amendments did not provide adequate time for members of the public to review and comment on them as required under Sunshine Ordinance Sections 67.15(a) and (b), and were substantive changes to the Development Agreement for which the agenda description for the meeting was not adequate under Sunshine Ordinance Section 67.7(b).

Supervisors Eric Mar, David Chiu, Scott Wiener, and Malia Cohen were found in violation of those sections of the ordinance. Each supervisor is required to adhere to state and local open government laws, and their acknowledgement of their own lack of review of important and controversial amendments was minimal at best.

The Parkmerced Development Agreement had been deferred two additional months for review and there was no reason that another week to allow transparency in the process would damage the agreement. This project is scheduled to take up to 30 years to complete and many residents will be displaced from their homes in the process.

Hope Johnson is Chair of the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.

December 2011

 

City the Big Winner As Sunshine Proves Its Value

Kimo Crossman and Allen Grossman are the kind of citizens we admire. These two advocates for open government have conducted their own war on backroom deals that has taken years out of their lives—so far at their own expense. They’ve been vilified by Ken Garcia in the Examiner and in articles in the Chronicle as well as the SF Weekly for “abusing the system” by requesting that the City turn over public information in the time required by law and in the form they requested. They were called “nuisance,” “vexing gadfly,”

This time Kimo Crossman’s bird-dogging led to a savings of $3.5 million in transfer taxes from real estate interests of Morgan Stanley. This kind of information should be rewarded under the City’s 2006 Whistleblower Act, but Assessor Phil Ting has not been willing to part with the reward. This prompted Crossman to hire high-powered attorney Steve Gruel, known as a no-holds-barred courtroom brawler, to get Crossman what is coming to him. “This is a complete win-win situation. The City gains with a huge tax payment and Mr. Crossman’s hard work earns him an award,” said Attorney Gruel.

While Ting shared information willingly, some bureaucrats decide not to comply with Sunshine and the only recourse the public has is a potentially expensive legal battle. Since the passage of Prop G in 1999, no one has been willing to risk a trial. That is, until Allen Grossman sued the Ethics Commission and its Executive Director, John St. Croix. Sunshine won a major victory in January as St. Croix settled out of court on charges of suppressing public records without justification for his “summary dismissal of every violation by City officials, including the Mayor and the City Attorney, of open government laws referred to the Ethics Commission by the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, a total of 14 such referrals over the past five years.”

The Sunshine Task Force depends on the Ethics Commission to enforce open government laws and can only make recommendations to the Director, an effort that has been severely crippled by St. Croix’s refusal to pursue a single violation or to make public the documents and records that would indicate his justification for the denial. St. Croix’s failure to comply with the original records requests cost the City (and taxpayers) $24,900 in fees to Grossman’s attorneys. Grossman also has access to the records. We hope he will share them.

Crossman and Grossman have spared neither time nor expense in pursuit of Sunshine scofflaws, and have been unfairly maligned in the press. We believe the City benifits from increased public information, Westside readers want to know, and so do we.

April 2010

Herrera Should Get Serious About Sunshine

Our public-records laws are broken. When we need information from the City, it’s far from certain that we will get it. Many citizens are learning the hard way that the law may be on their side, but enforcement has been left to the good faith efforts of the Ethics Commission. The commission, relying on advice from the City Attorney, has dismissed every alleged violation since San Francisco voters passed Prop G (Sunshine) in 1999 by a 16 point margin. In truth, the enforcement of the law is based on decisions made behind the City Attorney’s closed doors.

No Department has more influence on the level of city entities’ compliance with open government laws than the City Attorney’s Office, and since we were invited to meet with City Attorney Herrera (see “Guess Who’s Not Running for Mayor” on this page) we decided to ask a few questions — especially after Herrera’s comment about his department’s involvement in everything City Hall, “...you name it—we’re involved in it.”

Our question was, what was the City Attorney going to do about the sad state of open government in the City with what some consider the most powerful sunshine laws on the books? Herrera’s response was typical political banter — he loves sunshine and provides his calendars, etc. This may or may not be true, but the ultimate responsibility for compliance rests on his shoulders. In fact, the City Attorney’s Office has itself been the subject of numerous complaints to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, the 11 member body responsible for monitoring open-government laws. And the task force has upheld many of those complaints as violations of the law.

City voters spoke clearly in 1999, despite the opposition of then-City Attorney Louise Renne, who publicly opposed the stronger laws. Herrera, Renne’s protégé, appears to have defeated the laws behind the scenes, so bureaucrats can ignore the laws with impunity. (Please read the Task Force Report for 2008 on their website: sfgov.org/sunshine).

The task force is empowered to interpret the laws and recommend enforcement, not the City Attorney. The taxpayers pay to maintain that body; but day to day, City entities receiving public records requests must rely on the City Attorney’s advice to determine whether a given piece of information must be disclosed. In the eyes of the law, seeking such advice constitutes a good-faith effort to comply with the sunshine laws.

The problem is that the City Attorney at times gives advice that seems to run counter to the task force’s interpretations, and there is no recourse, short of a lawsuit, without cooperation from the City Attorney. We encourage Mr. Herrera to step up to the plate.

June 2009