Inequality in San Francisco breeds political unease

Good morning! We’ll get to legislative action in a second, but first we turn to San Francisco, where inequality is making for tense politics.

As San Francisco’s sharp inequality draws national attention this election year, California Democrats have begun to question how to explain their role in fostering — and reversing — the trend.

The gulf between the progressive city’s richest and poorest, and the emptying space between the two, has come to haunt Democrats worried that their almost unfettered control over state and municipal politics has left promises unfulfilled and little plan for change in the future.

“During all my years in Asia I constantly grappled with the perniciousness of poverty,” Thomas Fuller wrote in a dispatch for the New York Times Sunday Review. “Yet somehow I was unprepared for the scale and severity of homelessness in San Francisco. The juxtaposition of the silent whir of sleek Tesla electric vehicles, with the outbursts of the mentally ill on the sidewalks … .”

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “The California Fair Political Practices Commission will investigate donations made to the California Democratic Party by privately owned utilities and other energy interests. The action was prompted by an August report. Despite the report’s heavy focus on Gov. Jerry Brown — it was entitled “Brown’s Dirty Hands” — the commission did not see fit to investigate the governor himself.” The San Diego Union-Tribune has more. 

• “More than 50 employees working inside Los Angeles County’s juvenile lockups received promotions despite a history of disciplinary problems or criminal arrests under a deal county leaders quietly cut earlier this year,” writes the Los Angeles Times.

• “State Assembly candidate Madison Nguyen appears to be dealing with at least one argumentative campaign volunteer impostor. A man posing as a campaign volunteer has been visiting San Jose homes and getting into arguments with residents, but there might be more than one person involved, Nguyen’s campaign said,” The San Jose Mercury News has more.

• “Offering relief to dogs stuck in hot cars, Gov. Jerry Brown on Saturday signed legislation letting Californians in limited cases – and without fear of civil liability – smash car windows to set them free,” reports The Sacramento Bee.

Legislature:

• Gone ’til December, but there will be a hearing on the use of psychotropic drugs in the foster care system at 1 p.m. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced.

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Assembly Bill 10, authored by Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Glendale, modernizes the Form 500 disclosure document in five ways:

1. “Clarify the reporting ranges for investments, property and income to be more specific and more in line with modern property-value ranges, providing more accurate information of the financial interests of an elected official;
2. “Require elected officials to disclose who their business partners are;
3. “Require elected officials to disclose what exactly their businesses do;
4. “Require elected officials to report the specific instances when they recused themselves from a vote because of a conflict of interest; and
5. “Extend the behested payment reporting requirements to include candidates, and elected officials for one year after leaving elective office, so that elected officials must disclose if they solicit funds from outside institutions during their term in order to pay their own salaries on their way out of office.”

“Increased transparency is essential to protecting public resources, preventing corruption and restoring public trust,” said Gatto in a prepared statement. “This legislation will modernize disclosure forms to reveal the business dealings of political insiders and give Californians greater access to information about their representatives.”

As Jeff Mitchell of the Salinas Californian previously reported, the current Form 700 documents are “completely undemanding and lax … in compelling local, county and state officials to tell us the actual nature of their personal financial affairs.” Without this information, he said, constituents “would never know when our electeds and key civil ministers are acting in the best interests of themselves or their friends and not of the public.”

AB10 has been ordered to the state Senate for consideration.