[UPDATE: Transit buff murphstahoe has this reaction:
"@BevanDufty calls Central Subway a "very strong connection to Caltrain" - wrong! http://t.co/32xzseD8 #sfmayor"]
First up is a conversation with Seán Martinfield, Editor and Publisher of the San Francisco Sentinel.
Excerpts:
“I feel confident I am as viable as anyone else in this race.”
Disagree, respectfully. An incumbent Mayor losing is like a once-every-couple-decades kind of thing, right? Incumbents have huge built-in advantages, of course.
“I definitely feel The Bay Citizen has marginalized me and that they have reported I’m a second-tier candidate within the LGBT community – when, if you look at the details of the poll, I doubt they’ve even sampled thirty-five LGBT voters in their sample.”
It’s not TBC’s job to spin for any particular candidate, is it?
“And so, you have The Bay Citizen which is an insert newspaper for the New York Times…”
Is that an insult? Is it meant to be? I can’t tell. But I can tell you that one look at its payroll will reveal that it’s a major bay area media entity.
“…and they threw a poll. An initiative like that is about marginalizing me. It’s about telling people that I can’t win.”
Wow. The whole exercise with USF and spending $10k on independent polling was about marginalizing Bevan Dufty? Really? (Maybe I’m not reading this right.)
The Bay Citizen called me “a Zombie” and didn’t even spell my name right in the story.
“Zombie candidate,” IIRC. Some people (such as myself, for one) have issues with how RCV and public financing relate to each other under the current rules, of course.
Next up is this bit from Jerrold Chinn at SF Public Press. You can fire it up at 2:45 or so.
“Do you support the Central Subway? Why or why not?”
For the record, here’s the damning Grand Jury report.
Per the video, Bevan thinks that people don’t have any idea that Rose Pak was the first Chinese American reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle? I think they do and I’m not sure how this bears on the CS. (You know, some people want to take steps to improve the 30 Stockton corridor like right now, instead of after a decade of delays and cost overruns. Is that racist to want to improve things now? How is it that “transit justice” can only be satisfied by the current horrible, horribly expensive, Bridge-to-Nowhere Central Subway scheme? I’m baffled.)
Bevan says that “90% of the Central Subway will be paid by the federal government?” This seems impossible to me. Is this in writing? Does it include past and future overruns?
Bevan says that the CS has to come before any other major project, such as putting rails in on Geary. But he doesn’t say why.
Bevan says that we would lose in excess of $100,000,000 if we pull the plug now. I thought it was closer to $200,000,000 myself but of course bad transit decisions cost money. The question is what should we do at this point. (I think we’d all be better off taking a new tack by simply paying back the Feds.)
I don’t know, if anybody wants to go line-by-line on today’s updated critique from Save MUNI, be my guest. (To be honest, I don’t know how anybody can defend the station placement decisions, the car-length decision, the let’s stop at southern Chinatown decision, among others. The CS is a politics-first, transit-last project, IMO.
(And oh, BTW, there’s a pool going on right now around town about what position Bevan will be appointed to and when. FYI.)
O.K, enjoy, after the jump
Apparently, Mayor Ed Lee is too busy running for election to attend today’s mayoral debate at UC Hastings. He’s unveiling a sign to honor himself, or something.
But you can attend, down at 198 McAllister, or you can watch online.
UC Hastings College of the Law is pleased to present the San Francisco Mayoral Debate, a mayoral candidates’ forum for the legal community. The UC Hastings Mayoral Debate will focus on policy disputes that separate the candidates. Questioning will be based on mayoral candidates’ responses to a San Francisco issues questionnaire developed by SF Public Press with professors from UC Hastings and the UC Davis’ Political Science department. This event is free and open to the public.
An invitation has also been extended to Mayor Ed Lee.
UC Hastings is committed to making its facilities and events accessible in compliance with the ADA.”
[Oh, here we go, it's the Citizen of Tomorrow Awards, just posted.]
Now, the problem I had last night was being too ambitious, thinking I could drop by the First Birthday Celebration of The Bay Citizen and then hustle it uphill to the Specfic Whites neighborhood by nine-ish, thinking that this year’s party would be like last year’s, you know, the one they had in the Twitterloin. That one was off the hook.
Anyway, here it is at the stated 8:00 PM starting time. (A dozen people to park your car, but only one to check you into the place.)
(Why, yes, Terra _is_ 200 feet away from a bridge and two miles away from a tunnel – why do you ask?)
And here are your food trucks. (Everything seems to taste better when it’s from a truck, non?)
Click to expand
I guess things got going later in the evening. But I’ll tell you, if you skipped the first hour of last year’s soiree, which was off the hook, you would have missed a lot.
The good thing is that The Bay Citizen produced, as designed, a lot of good stuff the past year.
Anyway, Bon Anniversaire, The Bay Citizen.
[Whoops, spoke too soon - turns out that the SFGate/San Francisco Chronicle's Katie Baker was en la casa. The conspiracy of silence broken.]
Despite all the obituaries written earlier this year, The Bay Citizen celebrated its launch yesterday at the Great American Music Hall. Some TBC editors on the scene were fretting about getting a new batch of “stately idiom” finished up for the following morning, but a good time was had by all.
They literally rolled out the red carpet in the Tenderloin last night:
Who was there? Everybody. (Everybody excepting some of the hAtERz in local media who feel any new investment should go to existing concerns, you know, the ones that employ the hAtERz themselves. The hAtERz that showed somehow even managed to generate, with noticeable effort, Mona Lisa smile/smirks for the camera.) The place was packed from the get-go, baby. Check out the Party Pix from E.B.Boyd showing who all was there.
Standing room only:
Bay Citizen CEO Lisa Frazier (pronounced fraze-yah) started things off by inviting Founder Warren Hellman to play a song.
Lois Beckett snapped the chorus and here are the full lyrics to the sing-a-long tune Hardly Strictly News. Note the A-A-B-B rhyming scheme. Also note:
“We met with Lisa Frazier who pronounced ‘for now it will be free’/
A multi-layered news hub is the only way to be.”
What, “for now?” Uh oh:
Click to expand. It’s quite legible at 1200 pixels.
Anyway, F. Warren appeared to be somewhat irked by the constant chatter of the assembled throng. Oh well.
Here’s the mise-en-scene from up on the catwalk:
A big thank you to all the founding investors, founding members, patrons, and corporate sponsors. Notably, Dede Wilsey’s name isn’t on this list, so perhaps she just recently kicked in her seven figure donation? (Or let’s call it a $500,000 donation with Uncle Sucker kicking another half mil., mas o menos. That’s the thing with non-profit journalism – the federal govmint lowers your taxes by about 50 cents for every dollar you donate, assuming you pay a lot of taxes in the first place. This is the Unfair Advantage that the Chronicle people complain about. Speaking of which, nothing yet about TBC from the SFC – check for yourself.)
Everybody’s a star:
$5 tote bags just like Trader Joe’s and the KQED, plus loads of free bumper stickers:
The lives of the party:
Anyway, had to bail early to get down to Massive Attack at the Warfield while Arcadio was playing the TBC party. The booze was flowing and the place was still packed when I left, anyway.
Bon Courage, Bay Citizen!
All the deets, after the jump
