#eric mar

[aaronpeskin]

How a self-proclaimed real estate expert and his acolytes on the Board of Supervisors lost $20 million in one meeting.

30 Van Ness remains off the market. Sources close to the city’s Real Estate Department say it will be returning to the market soon for $60 million, $20 million less than the rejected offer.

For those keeping track that is enough for the city to build affordable housing units for about 40 families.

[bobgunderson]

'Citizens for More Television' Group Against Slower City Speed Limits

Recently, Supervisor Eric Mar has asked city government to look into the possibility of reducing traffic speeds in order to help reduce all the injuries and fatalities on the streets of San Francisco. "We must do all that we can do to make sure that the streets are safer for our residents and a speed limit reduction may have a significant impact on achieving this," said Supervisor Eric Mar.  But a lot of people have wondered what kind of impact this might have on motorists, particularly since the average american enjoys watching 5 hours of television a day.

"Well this just f*cking blows!  I'm going to miss part the Price is M*ther*ucking Right!" Image found here.

Jake Gandson explains, "Hey I'm all for slower speeds and safety, but not if it comes at the expense of less television watching, or if I have to slow down."  The group "Citizens for More Television" have balked at the idea of lower speed limits which t other cities such as Paris and New York have recently implemented.  CFMT argued, "We really don't know what kind of consequences these speed changes have had on TV watching in those cities we really aught to know before we lower driving speeds to safe levels."

If slower speed limits are implemented, it could mean minutes or even tens of minutes before you'll get  home to binge watch. image found here.

Janic Loftman said she's sympathetic to all those people who are maimed and injured from car traffic every year, but also said, "You know if we could just do this during the summer months when there's not a lot of new programming, I'd be all for it.  Once those fall series start I'm hard pressed to drive the speed limit in the city as it stands."  Where or not slower speeds will happen in San Francisco is still up to debate, but couch potatoes around the city on edge worrying about what commercials they might miss if this passes.

[thecubanartproject]

Art Market San Francisco | April 29 - May 3, 2015 | Apply Now

Art Market San Francisco | April 29 – May 3, 2015 | Apply Now

Art Market San Francisco will return to the beautiful Fort Mason Festival Pavilion thisApril 29 – May 3 to celebrate its fifth edition as the Bay Area’s leading contemporary and modern art fair. Art Market San Francisco’s fifth year will kick off with a benefit for our longtime partner,the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, comprised of the de Young and the Legion of Honor. This year, for the…

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[becauseofyuri]

Yuri Moved Me

I loved Yuri’s courage, humility and clarity.  She moved me, and my Ethnic Studies Students at SF State, to learn about my own history, to develop empathy and SOLIDARITY for other oppressed people, and to build UNITY and to STRUGGLE against our common enemies. But now her death is hitting me even harder when I connect it to the recent passing of others like Maya Angelou, Vincent Harding, Amiri Baraka, Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, Mandela and local SF Bay Area movement friends Carl Bloice and Karega Hart. But I know Yuri, Amiri, Carl and Karega would have cautioned us against mourning and encouraged us to continue rebuilding our movements together for a new world for all our children.

Eric Mar is a member of the SF Board of Supervisors, the former President of the SF Board of Education and a longtime social justice activist.

[dualcitysf]

It's very clear who the culprits are: speculators whose stated goal is to flip the property for massive profits. Regulating speculators rather than pointing the finger at tech workers seems more productive.

Eric Mar, District 1 Supervisor, at Board of Supervisors committee hearing on Nov 14th, 2013

[sfrecparkdept]

Something Fishy at Stow Lake Boathouse

SF Rec & Park shows its corrupt side again.

Excerpts from The Sunset Beacon:

"Earlier this year, Dumont, who describes herself as "a frequent walker at Stow Lake, long time San Franciscan and an unlicensed historic preservationist," claimed that the Save Stow Lake Boathouse Coalition, a group including more than 1,900 individuals, multiple neighborhood groups and the San Francisco Chapter of the Sierra Club, had requested SF Supervisor Eric Mar's help with transparency, fairness and fiscal responsibility in regard to Rec. and Park's Stow Lake Boathouse RFQ.

"We want fairness and transparency in this process. We have been ignored, dismissed and deceived by Rec. and Park and we know they do not have the public's best interests at heart," Dumont said. "We want an EIR. We want community oversight and involvement in the selection ... we cannot know if that is occurring because of the selective secrecy taking place.""

Excerpts from SaveStowLake.org:

"Rec & Park General Manager, Phil Ginsburg negotiated a sweetheart lease to the New Mexico souvenir chain with NO boating experience: Ortega Family Enterprises. Even Ortega offered thousands more in annual rent on two separate public meetings and Ginsburg refused to take more money! Ginsburg claims Rec & Park is broke, "every dollar counts" and that he HAD to lay off 99% of all recreation directors and many gardeners last year. So why did Ginsburg give Ortega such a deep discount on the one and only Stow Lake Boathouse concessions?  AND why has Ginsburg committed to spending our money for capital improvements for Ortega's benefit? The new lease even has the taxpayers paying Ortega's gas, water and electric bills for the next 15-20 years! And Phil Ginsburg continues to hire 125k+ year salary management/public relations people to help him scam the public and privatize our parks!  

Sup. Eric Mar, working closely with Ginsburg, sold out thousands of his constituents and fast tracked the deeply flawed discounted lease to a New Mexico based souvenir chain, with NO boating experience NINE days BEFORE the Rec & Park Commission had voted to approve it! In spite of overwhelming opposition from the community and a lease that gives the New Mexico chain many discounts and is embedded with hidden costs to the taxpayers, Mar SPONSORED this lease, losing millions of dollars for the people of San Francisco and deceiving taxpayers. Mar also arranged to sit in at the Budget & Finance Committee for a mysteriously missing Sup. Jane Kim, so Mar could vote for his own legislation re: the boathouse lease! 

SHAME on Sup. Mar for ignoring your constituents and the clear evidence of wrongdoing at Rec & Park and breaking your campaign promises to safeguard our seniors, our children, wildlife and parks. Our coalition wrote, called you, and met with you to inform you of Rec & Park's misdeeds and you did NOTHING, but help Ginsburg deceive the public. Internal emails reveal that you had very few, if any, calls/letters of support for the Ortega chain... yet YOU insured their lease was approved at the Board. You ignored thousands of calls/emails/visits/faxes from citizens opposed to the Ortega.  The city will lose approx. $2 million JUST in RENT over 20 years, by going with Ortega. In addition: the seriously flawed lease opens the door to Rec & Park spending approximately $1 -$2 million in capital improvements, even when they wrote in the RFQ that they have NO capital funds available for the boathouse."

[tld2012]

Hearing on event security as SFPD pushes police state

04.30.13 - 4:11 pm | Steven T. Jones

Just a few weeks ago, Sup. Scott Wiener, civil libertarians, and I were raising concerns here about the SFPD unilaterally expanding its video surveillancereach. Then came the bombings at the Boston Marathon, which the SFPD used to seriously up the ante in the police state pot, asking for real time videosurveillance up and down Market Street and banning backpacks at Bay to Breakers.

Now, I'm not one to stand in the way of reasonable security precautions. But we shouldn't just defer to the SFPD on whatever it says it wants because then we'll have cameras on every corner, spy drones overhead, stop-and-frisk, and an ever-greater portion of our tax dollars going to expand the police state. Because the cops will always want more tools to police us, tools they will always say they need to protect us – it's just in their nature. But it's up to the rest of us to strike the right balance and not lose our heads every time some whack-job resorts to violence.

That's why it's good to see that Sup. Eric Mar has called a Neighborhood Service and Safety Committee hearing for this Thursday at 2pm on security measures for large events, to which he's invited the SFPD, Planning Department, Recreation and Parks Department, and Entertainment Commission. Let's talk about this before acting too rashly.

I'm always amazed at Americans' capacity for fear and overreaction. One nut decides to put a crude explosive in his shoe and suddenly we all have to remove our shoes every time we board an airplane (a silly measure most other countries don't require). Even as horrible as the 9-11 attacks were, the 2,977 people they killed that day is a small fraction of the death toll that we inflicted in response (6,693 US troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis killed), and I don't think anyone can credibly claim that we're any safer today as a result.

Fearful people will accept anything police say will make them safer, and that's how the slide into police states throughout history always begin, pushed by tyrants of all ideological stripes. But isn't that just giving in to terrorism? After all, we're all far more likely to be killed by a distracted motorist than we are a terrorist, but I'm not hearing calls for big crackdowns on drivers, even in the face of good evidence this would keep us safer than banning backpacks.

Our country was founded by people who were more wary of soldiers and cops than they were random kooks, and I think we'd do well to remember what people like Benjamin Franklin had to say about irrational fears: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

[factcheckingdavidlee]

Step Right Up Ladies and Gentlemen! It's Three Lies for the Price of One!

THE LIE: So the David Lee campaign had itself a little event today as part of it's "50 Ways" schtick. We are especially fond of "#16 Democrats for David" rally to show of his broad range of support from local Democrats. 

Who makes up this large coalition of local Democrats? That would be

Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club

City Democratic Club

Westside Chinese Democratic Club

Irish American Democratic Club

Asian Pacific Islander Democratic Club

Wow! That's certainly a lot of support! Just look at this collage of organizations.

The support is so massive that they might need another one just to contain all of those endorsements that he has rolling in.

But seriously, while Alice B. Toklas has some major political muscle, and Westside Chinese and API's membership includes most of the who's who of the Asian American Democratic leaders, that's actually a tiny list considering that there are actually 22 Citywide Democratic clubs that have been officially chartered by the San Francisco Democratic Party.

Three of the five endorsing David are considered to be some of the most moderate to conservative Democratic clubs around and the other two Westside Chinese and API are great Democratic clubs, but they also answer to David Lee's fairy godmother and State Assembly Speaker Pro Tem, Fiona Ma. And in addition to Ma, Lee has former two former San Francisco Mayors, US Senator Dianne Feinstein and Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom backing him. With all due respect to these three fine politicians, they all have a record of siding with developers, corporations, anti-tenant groups, downtown interests, and just about every other evil 1%er that you can think of. 

THE TRUTH: Meanwhile, in the land of reality, incumbent Supervisor Eric Mar has a ridiculously impressive long list of Democratic club and organizational endorsements which can partially be found on his campaign website which also includes an lengthy list of former and current Democratic leaders and elected officials, among them more than a dozen current and former members of the Board of Supervisors, everyone's favorite Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, and State Senator Leland Yee. But the real salt in the wound is that only one candidate received the sole endorsement of the neighborhood Richmond District Democratic Club and San Francisco Democratic Party . . . and that person would be . . . wait for it . . . Eric Mar. 

And speaking of the San Francisco Democratic Party, we've been hearing some rumors that moderate matriarch and current Party Chair, Mary Jung, is a little upset that David Lee used a picture of her and her name to list as a supporter. But because we're all about facts here at Fact Checking David Lee, we won't pull a David Lee and officially confirm that a truthful statement. But we promise that once we do have a credible source, that we will update the fact checker from 5 lies to 6. 

But we can confirm one gem of information that was recently published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Endorsement Issue, based on publicly available election records. Aside from the 100,00 voters that his organization, the Chinese American Voters Education Committee (CAVEC), David claims to be lifelong Democrat who is absolutely dedicated the values and inclusiveness of the Democratic Party . . . so much that he's forgotten to vote in several recently past elections. And after the current ethics violation complaint that he used CAVEC as his personal tax free piggy bank for the last three years, all we can say about that is WHAH! WHAH! 

So let's recap:

Lie #1: David has broad Democratic support standing behind him. False

Lie #2: David is the choice candidate among San Francisco Democrats. False

Lie #3: David Lee is a committed Democrat who values the voting process. False

Current Score: David Lee 0; The Facts 5