While it hasn’t got nearly the attention, the same tensions between wealthy tech employers and local interest groups – which see the employers as hurting quality of life by increasing congestion and by making housing costlier – are playing out in the June 5 San Francisco mayor’s race. It’s being held to fill the vacancy created by Mayor Ed Lee’s death from a heart attack on Dec. 12. Lee’s death was lamented by tech executives who called him a key to San Francisco’s emergence as a world tech capital.

That sentiment is far from universal. A May 15 Business Insider analysis by Melia Robinson that was featured on the San Francisco Chronicle website was headlined “San Francisco is fed up with Big Tech, and residents are begging the next mayor to do something about it.”

Leading mayoral candidates critical of tech’s effects

It’s difficult to be confident who’s leading the mayor’s race since San Francisco is one of a handful of cities to use a top-three ranked voting system in which a candidate who doesn’t get a majority in the initial tally can still win based on her or his second- and third-place votes. But the consensus top three are all liberal to very liberal Democrats by national, if not San Francisco, standards. They are Board of Supervisors Chairwoman London Breed, who would be the city’s first African-American woman mayor and has the support of former Mayor Willie Brown’s business-friendly coalition; Supervisor Jane Kim, who would be the city’s first Korean-American mayor and is a mostly beloved figure among local progressives; and former state Sen. Mark Leno, who would be the city’s first openly gay mayor and who also runs well to Breed’s left.

Breed, who was deposed as acting mayor by progressive supervisors earlier this year, seems to want the most limited policy changes aimed at tech workers. She has backed limits on short-term rentals by companies like Airbnb and wants to cap the number of ride-hailing vehicles at any given time, and perhaps put restrictions on food deliveries as well.

Kim wants tech companies to improve pay and benefits for lower-rung workers so they can live in the city. She says companies subcontract services for janitorial and cafeteria work so they can avoid responsibility for the poor quality of life for those hired. She has expressed interest in requiring Uber and Lyft to pay a per-rider fee.

Leno wants to impose hiring rules on city tech companies to force them to hire city residents. He says this hiring shouldn’t just be for blue-collar positions but for administrative and sales jobs. He has also called for tech firms and their employers to “invest” in the city by committing to improving its lifestyle for those beyond the wealthy.

Some warn tech firms shouldn’t be taken for granted

The only Republican in the race – business consultant Richie Greenberg – and business groups say that mayoral candidates shouldn’t take tech companies for granted. They note that the city’s tech boom may have peaked in 2016, with exploding housing costs hurting San Francisco more than the broader Bay Area-Silicon Valley tech region in general.

But this point of view is a tough sell going into June 5’s voting. Perhaps the best example of this is a deal orchestrated in 2011 by then-Mayor Lee with the support of Supervisor Kim to revitalize the rough Tenderloin and Mid-Market districts west of downtown by giving a six-year break on city payroll taxes to companies located there. This was meant to keep Twitter’s headquarters from moving out of the city and to attract new tech firms to the area.

The proposal was widely seen as a smart way to maintain San Francisco’s tech momentum in 2011. In 2014, business groups hailed the agreement for keeping Twitter and for creating 13,000 jobs and generating much more revenue for the city than the sums lost because of the tax break.

But that same year, a San Francisco Chronicle analysis noted that the deal was seen by many residents as a sign of the city caving to business pressure – and it has emerged as a reason for progressives to question Kim’s bona fides.

“The voter coalitions that elect moderates in San Francisco are Chinese voters, white homeowners, older renters, and the 10 Republicans left in town, combined with unions that represent building trades, police officers and firefighters,” political consultant Jim Ross told the San Francisco Chronicle the day after Lee’s death. Progressives dominate every other category of voters, especially young tech workers and social justice activists.

While many other names have been mentioned, here are the most prominent likely or declared candidates in the June 5 special election to serve out the last year and a half of moderate Lee’s term:

– Acting Mayor London Breed, part of the moderate faction on the city-county Board of Supervisors who shares Lee’s view that dealing with homelessness is the city’s most important issue. Breed, pictured, is the first African-American woman to serve as mayor. There is a possibility that supervisors will name an interim mayor rather than give Breed months to use her authority as both mayor and supervisor to build support for her expected mayoral bid. This could be supported by moderate as well as progressive supervisors in a city full of ambitious politicians.

– Supervisor Jane Kim, part of the progressive wing, filed paperwork to run for mayor on Wednesday. Kim lost a state Senate bid to moderate Supervisor Scott Weiner last year. She has won national and international attention for her proposed state “robot tax” assessing fees on companies whose use of robots or algorithms has led to the loss of jobs. The money from the fees would be used for worker retraining and other programs meant to minimize the impact of losing jobs to technology.

– State Sen. Mark Leno announced in May that he would run for mayor in 2019 after Lee was termed out. Now he’s running in the June special election, touting his “progressive vision for our city, grounded in a commitment to affordability and civil rights.” A former Assembly member and supervisor, he’s won a reputation as an energetic policy wonk with interest in a wide range of issues, from gender and transgender rights to prison and criminal justice reform to the environment.

– Former San Francisco Supervisor Angela Alioto, daughter of former Mayor Joseph Alioto, has taken out papers to run. An attorney specializing in discrimination cases, she cited homelessness as a key issue and said it was crucial to build a coalition with tech firms to address the issue and larger housing concerns. She has deep ties to moderates both through family ties and years in the city’s political trenches.

– Assemblyman David Chiu, a former supervisor, faces perhaps the toughest decision of any candidate. If the moderate runs in the June mayoral special election, he can’t seek re-election to the Assembly in November – meaning he’d be giving up the safest of legislative seats with more than eight years until he would face term limits. But Chiu is poised to inherit support from the Chinese American community that was so valuable to Mayor Lee, and he has high name recognition and fundraising clout.

Willie Brown still a crucial behind-the-scenes player

Even at 83, former Mayor and former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown remains a key player in San Francisco’s political intrigue. After Mayor Gavin Newsom was elected lieutenant governor in 2010, Brown helped arrange the appointment of Lee – then the city’s chief administrative officer – as interim mayor and gave Lee crucial help in winning a full term in 2011 after Lee broke a promise to progressives to not seek the office.

San Francisco progressives fear that moderate Brown will try to execute the same maneuver with Breed, who is considered one of his proteges.

Both cities cite the same reasons they are epicenters for homelessness: mild climates and extremely expensive housing. But knowing what’s driving the problem isn’t the same as having an answer for it.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Council leaders in 2015 declared a “state of emergency” over the homeless crisis and announced $100 million in funding for homelessness relief in 2015-16, a big increase over previous years. In 2016, city voters followed up by approving a $1.2 billion bond to ramp up plans to build housing for the homeless, and in fiscal 2016-17, homeless funding went up to $138 million.

But since the emergency declaration, the average number of those homeless on a given night according to city tracking has gone up by nearly two-thirds. In 2015, the average number was 21,338. In 2016, it was 28,464. In 2017, with half the year still to go, the number has grown by 18 percent to 34,189.

Not only are efforts to get more homeless into shelters failing, a Friday report in the Los Angeles Times concluded that a $14 million program to clean up homeless encampments was ineffective because as soon as one camp area was closed and cleaned, another popped up nearby.

City officials argued they were making progress in addressing an immense problem. Residents weren’t buying it.

“[Work crews] clean up and they come right back. It’s just a never-ending cycle,” a North Hills hair salon owner told the Times. “You’d think they would come and find a place for them, but they don’t. They just tell them to move.”

Heavy spending producing weak results

In San Francisco, residents – and elected officials – face even worse frustrations. The city spends far more than Los Angeles to deal with a smaller number of homeless people, without the gains one might expect.

In 2015, Mayor Ed Lee was re-elected to a second four-year term after a campaign in which he promised to tackle what was unanimously seen as a humanitarian and civic crisis. But eight months later, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a rare front-page editorial declaring city efforts to have failed.

The number of homeless people on an average night was estimated at about 7,500 in January 2015. By late 2016, city officials’ estimate had jumped to about 10,000, with some homeless advocates saying the number was closer to 12,000. Different counts have different methodologies, leading to disputes over whether the problem is significantly worse than it used to be. But the Chronicle’s front-page editorial came down squarely on the side of those who argue some official counts are much too low.

Meanwhile, as in Los Angeles, attempts to clear homeless encampments that San Francisco voters had blessed by approving a measure prohibiting tents on public sidewalks in November 2016 were depicted by news coverage as more symbolic than substantive. Mayor Lee agreed with the assessment.

City spending on homelessness has gone from $241 million in fiscal 2015-16 to $275 million in 2016-17 to $305 million in the fiscal year that began Saturday. In May, a local nonprofit group also promised to provide a $100 million grant to tackle homeless.

But this may not affect the problem except on the margins. Local governments have long noticed that a relative handful of homeless people – those with serious mental illness – consume a disproportionate share of homeless funding with constant trips to emergency rooms and confrontations with police and residents. In San Francisco, this category of homeless people makes up 3 percent of total homeless but uses one-third of resources. A June 2016 Chronicle story suggested the tab for this group alone could eat up far more than one-third of all funds if its severe problems were addressed with the comprehensive approach that advocates want.

That would leave little to go around for the most common category of homeless person – those who lost shelter after losing a job or after a rent increase or a life emergency such as heavy medical bills.

In 2011, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (pictured) won a hard-fought deal with the Los Angeles police and firefighters unions that targeted “pension spiking” — late-career maneuvering that allowed individuals to push up their final pay and thus their annual pensions. It also reduced the minimum pension available after 20 years of service.

All employee unions also made concessions reducing retirement benefits for newly hired workers that year. And after the 2011 contracts, all new hires had to share in the costs of health care benefits. Taxpayers had previously covered the whole tab.

When Villaraigosa left office in 2013, he labelled the changes as among his most important accomplishments in his eight years on the job and said Los Angeles had achieved “the most far-reaching” pension reforms of any large city in the nation. The achievement is one of the centerpieces of his recently announced campaign for governor in 2018.

San Francisco followed a generally similar course in 2011. At the behest of newly elected Mayor Ed Lee and most supervisors, city voters approved Proposition C.

It eliminated a benefit in which employees who quit their jobs after five years could have all the pension contributions refunded with interest along with a full match from the city treasury. It also changed pension formulas so that new employees would get less generous benefits. It also capped some retiree payments. The campaign for Proposition C told voters the changes would lead to a decline in how much the city had to spend on pension benefits after the fiscal year ending in 2014 and produce $1.3 billion in savings over a decade.

Despite promises to voters, costs keep going up

Now, five years later, the reforms have proven deeply disappointing to budget watchers in both the iconic California cities.

This month, Los Angeles officials concluded after reviewing the final data for the 2015-16 fiscal year that payments for retirement benefits had hit an all-time high — both in the raw amount and as a share of annual revenue. The tab was $1.02 billion, or more than 20 percent of city revenue. That is expected to increase to $1.2 billion annually by decade’s end.

Officials said the main reason was that the positive effects of the new benefits weren’t being felt in a significant way; 19 of 20 police officers, for example, were working under the older, more generous terms.

San Francisco uses a far smaller percentage of its revenue for retirement benefits because it is its own county. County governments spend a much lower percentage of their general fund budgets on employee costs than cities because of the different nature of their responsibilities.

Instead of peaking in 2014, San Francisco pension costs in 2015-16 were $257 million — $42 million higher than expected. The total annual tab is now expected to be $390 million a year by 2019.

What did San Francisco officials blame? As with those in L.A., the slow early gains from changing pension formulas. But they also cited a factor that has actuaries deeply worried: the growing life expectancy of retirees.

With San Francisco’s revenue flooding in because of the tech boom, the pension tab is modest — likely less than 4 percent of the city-county’s budget in coming years. The 2016-17 budget is $9.7 billion.

On per-capita liabilities, S.F. highest of any local government

Yet when it comes to retiree health care, San Francisco has a long-term headache that’s among the worst in the nation — a $4 billion unfunded liability. The city-county has generally had a pay-as-you-go approach for these costs, declining to set aside funds for future bills.

According to a 2014 study by U.S. Common Sense, a fiscal watchdog group founded by Stanford graduates, this policy decision has left San Francisco with by far the highest unfunded liabilities on a per-person basis of any California local government of significant size.

The per-person liability in San Francisco then was $5,357. By comparison, Los Angeles County was $2,686. No large city in the state in 2104 had a liability even 40 percent the size of San Francisco’s.

Facing heavy pressure to add transit improvements, affordable housing, programs for the homeless and police officers, San Francisco supervisors have yet to make any significant gains in prefunding the retiree health benefits.

The affluent city has been roiled three times since December by cases where police fatally shot criminal suspects who didn’t appear to be an immediate threat to police or others nearby.

One consequence was the local Black Lives Matter branch pulling out of the signature event of the Gay Pride weekend in San Francisco over reports that police were going to have a higher presence because of post-Orlando massacre fears.

Black Lives Matter, which was to be an organizational grand marshal for the parade themed “For Racial and Economic Justice,” cited concerns over the San Francisco Police Department’s “recent track record of racist scandal and killings of people of color” and how first responders can be a source of harm to “queer communities of color.”

“The Black Lives Matter network is grateful to the people of San Francisco for choosing us, we choose you too,” said Malkia Cyril, a member of Black Lives Matter, in a press release. “As queer people of color, we are disproportionately targeted by both vigilante and police violence.”

That’s from an account in the Los Angeles Times.

Police union wary of S.F. reforms

This weekend flap came after the San Francisco Police Commission took an extraordinary step last week to impose formal limits on officers’ use of force. 

The amended policy calls for the use of “minimal” force in dealing with suspects, not “reasonable” force, which is the standard with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court. It also formally underscored the importance of officers using “de-escalation” techniques in incidents with members of the public that appear to have the potential for violence.

In negotiations with the ACLU, city leaders, the Public Defenders Office and other community groups, the San Francisco Police Officers Association strongly objected to the “minimal” force requirement. But the police union ended up agreeing not to oppose the change — for now.

The union has already emphasized it will never agree to a ban on the use of carotid restraint holds or to sharp new limits on shooting at moving vehicles.

This matters because collective bargaining laws still give the police union the chance to affect final policies.

Police may stop doing ‘anything but taking reports’

The fatal shooting of an unarmed criminal suspect in mid-May led to Police Chief Suhr’s forced resignation and his replacement on a temporary basis by one of his top aides, Deputy Chief Toney Chaplin.

San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, who have broken many key stories in police controversies in recent years, released a report that may make it difficult for SFPD to attract a high-profile replacement in a nationwide search.

Morale is so bad among officers convinced that they are being treated unfairly that it could soon affect everyday policing, Matier & Ross wrote.

“The fear is, they aren’t going to do anything but taking reports,” an unnamed San Francisco police union official told the columnists.

Since the protests in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 triggered sharp, sustained criticism of police behavior, crime has gone up in several U.S. cities. The cause or causes are a matter of much dispute. But a National Institute of Justice report this month said it was plausible to see the post-Ferguson criticism affecting how police did their jobs.

In the normal dynamics of government scandal and dysfunction, leaders identify a problem and work to address it, seeking to win media and public approval. But what’s going on in San Francisco reflects the normal dynamics of law-enforcement scandals. Police officers who feel underappreciated — even besieged since the Black Lives Matter movement began in 2014 — push back hard at the idea that they’re doing something fundamentally wrong, even when it comes to police killings of unarmed people.

The San Francisco Police Officers Association denounced Mayor Ed Lee’s decision to ask Suhr to quit. “His retirement under pressure is an extreme loss to the department and the city,” a union statement said. “Chief Suhr, at the core, was and always will be a cop’s cop and dedicated to the men and women who don the uniform every day to serve and protect.”

This attitude doesn’t bode well for interim Police Chief Toney Chaplin, who told reporters that his agenda was “reform, reform, reform” because “the department has to move forward.” 

But despite the praise for Suhr from the police union, the fatal May 18 shooting of the stolen-car suspect was one more example of his lack of control over his department. Suhr has long implored officers not to shoot into fleeing cars. The police union had also criticized his response to the text-message scandal, including his demanding that officers sign a pledge essentially promising to not be bigots.

Union: “Protect due process” of accused officers

There are presently 18 police officers accused in the texting scandal. While police union president Martin Halloran condemned “the appalling racist behavior committed by a handful of officers,” he also said the police union would closely scrutinize the disciplinary process to ensure it “protects the due process rights of the officers.”

Those right are so strong that it is often difficult to fire a police officer in California unless he commits a crime or acts in egregious ways with indisputable evidence. It’s also difficult to even find out about officer misconduct, as the Los Angeles Times reported in April.

Nearly 40 years ago, California took its first steps to shield police misconduct from the public when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law in his first term restricting details of officer personnel files from disclosure. A 2006 California Supreme Court decision went further and extended the law’s protections to cases in which civil service commissions weighed in on officer discipline. Today, almost all details about misconduct — including cases in which police officers were found to have used excessive force, engaged in racial profiling or lied on the job — are kept secret outside of court, administrative or civilian review board proceedings.

And although 23 states keep most public employee personnel records confidential, California is one of just three to provide specific protections for police information, according to a recent investigation by WNYC, a public radio station in New York.

Partly in response to the problems in his home town, Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, introduced SB 1286 that would open up police records in cases of “serious misconduct.” It passed an initial Senate committee vote last month, but then died without a second vote on Friday.

But as Conor Friedersdorf reported last August in The Atlantic, many police reform efforts have been launched in the Golden State only to go nowhere.

What’s next in San Francisco?

Meanwhile, Mayor Lee is facing pressure from the most liberal members of the city’s Board of Supervisors to go after bad cops. Supervisor Jane Kim, a rising star in city politics, has been pushing for change for more than four years and now has more support than ever.

But the police union thinks that Lee has already done too much to address police controversies.

On May 26th Mayor Ed Lee made some very disturbing remarks to the San Francisco Chronicle. These comments were directed at the SFPD Sergeant who was forced to discharge his firearm in the Officer Involved Shooting last week. The Mayor’s remarks were prejudicial and irresponsible. The POA has always responded to misinformed politicians who make such inflammatory statements and the Mayor is no exception.

That’s from Friday post on the police union’s Facebook page.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department continues its investigation of the San Francisco Police Department, launched in February. It’s not clear when the federal probe will conclude. 

But Suhr’s abrupt exit isn’t likely to yield a quiet interlude in San Francisco politics. Instead, the question for residents is this: Who will be the next city big shot to be taken down?

Mayor Lee is seen as a likely target of corruption investigations by both the FBI and San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon.

The FBI’s long-running “Operation Whitesuit” probe focuses on political bribery, Chinese-American gangs, money laundering and booze- and gun-running. It has already yielded criminal convictions against now-former San Francisco state Sen. Leland Yee,  former San Francisco school board president Keith Jackson and its initial target, Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, a legendary gang figure who claimed to have gone on the straight and narrow in recent years.

Spinning bribery web around mayor?

Chow and Lee have long had many mutual acquaintances and were seen together on many occasions at city banquets and civic functions, leading to speculation about improprieties. But it was only in late January that a specific law-enforcement threat to Lee emerged. That’s when Gascon — apparently working in concert with the FBI — arrested two former employees with the city’s Human Rights Commission on allegations that they took bribes to set up meetings with Lee. An undercover FBI agent says that Nazly Mohajer, a former agency commissioner, and Zula Jones, a former staffer, took $20,000 from him in 2011.

Lee has flatly denied any wrongdoing. But he admitted meeting the undercover agent. Meanwhile, authorities also have a tape in which Mohajer and Jones can be heard talking about ways to use the apparent bribe to pay off Lee’s 2011 campaign debts without drawing attention.

Former city Supervisor Bevan Dufty and other Lee allies have floated the theory that he is the victim in the case, done in by overzealous, imprudent aides. But Gascon didn’t just accuse Mohajer and Jones of bribery and money-laundering. He also filed related charges against Jackson, the already-convicted school board president — clearly trying to depict the alleged bribery as part of the larger criminal conspiracy that the FBI’s been targeting for many years.

Fire chief accused of ignoring severe problems

But Schur and Lee aren’t the only San Francisco leaders in hot water. Joanne Hayes-White, the longest-serving fire chief, is accused of ignoring public concerns and of borderline incompetence.

Hayes-White joined the San Francisco Fire Department in 1990 and quickly moved up the ranks, becoming chief in 2004. Her defenders depict criticism of her as politically driven, especially by a fire union with whom she has locked horns.

But a KQED report last month — while noting the union’s key role in the criticism of the chief — pointed to several areas of legitimate concern. The short list:

• According to a 2015 grand jury report, Hayes-White has done a weak job of making sure emergency-response times meet acceptable standards and has failed for years to address the reason for delays: an aging ambulance fleet prone to breaking down.
• Her department has a backlog of investigations on cases large and small, with some dating back four years. Hayes-White is blamed for refusing to listen to outside voices who say she needs to beef up her arson task force.
• Her department is accused of doing a bad job of regularly performing adequate safety checks on San Francisco’s hundreds of older apartment buildings. Hayes-White’s top aide admitted problems after a fatal four-alarm fire in the Mission District in January 2015.

But she had little choice after a bombshell San Francisco Chronicle investigation documented that the building had passed its most recent safety inspection in August 2014 despite a number of obvious warning signs. At the building, the newspaper wrote, “fire inspectors found safety violations for years — missing fire extinguishers, blocked fire escapes, inoperable smoke alarms and locked exits … . The building also had no fire alarm or sprinkler system because state and local laws don’t require those protections for older buildings with more than 16 apartments. And though the building had a required smoke alarm that could have alerted tenants to the fire, it never sounded. Residents told The Chronicle that someone disabled it after repeated false alarms.”

Hayes-White’s defenders depict the criticism as being ginned up by the fire union to gain advantage in ongoing debates about pay, staffing and hiring. But KQED’s reporting suggests that there is more in play than just political jousting.

Over the last 16 months the department has come under criticism for doing a weak job of documenting fire safety violations in the city’s older apartment buildings after a series of deadly fires. It has also come under scrutiny for moving too slowly to reduce a backlog of hundreds of fire investigations going back several years.

Fire chief for 12 years as problems built

Hayes-White, who was appointed fire chief in 2004 and by some accounts is the longest-serving fire chief of a large city in the U.S., can’t say she inherited her department’s problems. A San Francisco native, she joined the department in 1990 after graduating from the University of Santa Clara and quickly moved up the ranks, being promoted to lieutenant in 1993, captain in 1996 and then acting battalion chief that same year.

During her 26 years with SFPD, the quality of department management has been increasingly questioned.

Last June, a civil grand jury report found, among other things, the Fire Department’s emergency medical response times fail to meet state standards, in part because of “a chronic lack of serviceable ambulances.” The grand jury also found that half the department’s ambulance fleet exceeded its expected service life of 10 years and that the agency lacks a strategic plan for replacing ambulances and other emergency equipment. …

One high-profile example of the equipment problems: the failure of the department’s “jaws of life” devices after last November’s tour bus crash in Union Square.

The complex tools, used to cut open vehicles in which victims are trapped, were unable to cut through the high-grade steel of vehicles involved in the accident.

That’s also from KQED.

Mayor and police chief also have many critics

Meanwhile, Mayor Lee appears to be the ultimate target of an influence-peddling corruption investigation by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon that is apparently piggybacking on information from the far-reaching FBI probe that led to the corruption convictions of former state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, and legendary Chinatown gang figure Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, among others. In January, Gascon arrested two former employees of the city’s Human Rights Commission and alleged they had tried to sell access to Lee to an undercover agent.

Police Chief Suhr faces multiple problems. On Feb. 1, the Justice Department launched a probe into his department after complaints from the ACLU and African-American groups over police violence. In December, cellphone videos caught officers shooting to death Mario Woods, a 26-year-old crime suspect, as he walked away from them toward an open area. The contention that Woods was an immediate threat to public safety has drawn broad ridicule.

Suhr has faced criticism from both sides: from officers who say he doesn’t stick up for them in an era in which police feel under siege and from activists who say he has condoned bad behavior for years.

Suhr is also caught in the middle in a scandal that began a year ago over text messages showing officers using racist and racially charged language. Activists wants the 14 officers involved to be fired. Suhr’s most prominent response has been to ask his officers to make a seven-point pledge not to be racist and intolerant.

But a fresh round of racist texts from another group of officers emerged late last month, prompting national coverage of the disarray within Suhr’s department. Gascon, the DA, told The New York Times that he had profound questions about the SFPD’s internal culture, given that “officers involved in the new case were sending offensive texts even as the city investigated 14 of their colleagues last year for sending and receiving similar messages.”

Mayor Ed Lee and the San Francisco Unified School District announced Wednesday they plan to build a 100-unit housing complex solely for public school teachers and paraprofessionals, and invest up to $44 million over the next five years to help them purchase homes.

 

The proposals seek to help the many teachers and teaching assistants in San Francisco who say untenable housing prices have made it impossible for them to live in the city.

 

“Providing this housing opportunity for our teachers is one of the most important things we can do as a city,” Board of Supervisors President London Breed said in the mayor’s office Wednesday. She added that she was “really a bad kid in school” and the teachers who helped children like her “deserve an opportunity to live in this great city.”

 

The plan for a teachers-only housing complex is in its nascent stages. City and school officials said it will be constructed on property already owned by the school district, although they wouldn’t identify what sites are under consideration. They also haven’t determined who would qualify for the housing.

In May, Los Angeles Unified announced similar plans. This is from the LA Weekly:

The Los Angeles Unified School District [has a] 66-unit, four-story Selma Community Workforce Housing Project under construction at North Cherokee and Selma avenues in Hollywood and is scheduled to open in fall of 2016, the district says. It’s “intended for L.A. Unified employees who fall into a designated economic category. The complex is part of the District’s ambitious effort to attract and retain staff who want to live near work but can’t afford to pay for housing costs.”

Gov. Davis won tax break for teachers

This isn’t the first time that teachers in California have been singled out for special treatment. In 200o, Gov. Gray Davis sought to exempt teachers from the state income tax, a proposal that quickly faced strong opposition. He ended up signing a far more modest measure that gave teachers a tax credit of up to $1,500 for out-of-pocket classroom expenses.

Given that the average teacher pay in California is nearly $70,000, it seems possible that opposition could build to singling out a group with middle-class pay for special treatment in a state in which 23 percent of residents are in poverty. But San Francisco officials sought to blunt such concerns by framing the policy as being crucial to attract and retain teachers.

By Chris Reed

Unlike officials in New York, Washington and some other cities in the Northeast, elected leaders and law-enforcement officials in California took a generally measured and in some cases muted response to Monday’s terrorist attack at the iconic Boston Marathon.

The most specific expressions of alarm and concern came in San Francisco, which hosts the locally popular Bay to Breakers race on May 19 and the America’s Cup international sailing competition this summer and fall. Mayor Ed Lee and Police Chief Greg Suhr vowed to closely review security plans for the events and make sure they were strong. Suhr even compared his level of wariness over what the future might hold to where it was on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.

In Sacramento, organizers of popular running events such as the California International Marathon and the Komen Race for the Cure reviewed security plans. Marathon director John Mansoor told the Sacramento Bee that what happened in Boston had sent a “shock wave through the running world.”  Mansoor spoke of the difficulty of securing an entire 26-mile marathon route, as opposed to just a race’s start and finish lines.

Upgrades at major events, or no changes at all

Elsewhere in the Golden State, the rhetoric was much more muted.

In Oakland, police said they would have an increased presence in coming days at Oakland A’s and Golden State Warriors games.

In Los Angeles, police officials announced plans for higher-profile security at major events, such as Dodgers games. Airport police confirmed that security had been increased at the Los Angeles, Van Nuys and Ontario airports, which are all under the control of the city of Los Angeles. LAX was the site of a domestic terrorism incident on July 4, 2002, that is rarely mentioned in overviews of homegrown terror.

Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens said that events that draw large crowds, starting with but not limited to sporting and entertainment events, would have additional deputies on hand.

In San Diego, officials didn’t disclose any additional security measures. The San Diego police union, however, warned on Twitter of a phone scam called “Donations for the Boston Explosion.”

The Eureka Times-Standard said Humboldt County law enforcement authorities had taken no additional security steps beyond calling for “vigilance.”