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Police praised a motorist who steered this powerless, brakeless
car hurtling down a hill into an apartment building Aug. 1. No injuries.
A doctor was found in an elevator shaft Dec. 1 in a downtown office building six
days after plunging to his death. The death remains a mystery.
Nate on a new SF Giants ticketing system, published Dec. 3: "If there are cheaper tickets, I think it's a great idea.
But I don't always pay for my tickets. I mean, do I look like I've got money?"
San Francisco
Wave-power project faces delays, costs original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, May 30, 2009
An effort by San Francisco to harvest renewable energy from the power of the waves that roll into Ocean Beach has been dealt a blow by the federal government.
The development of ocean power, a budding source of clean energy that could prove lucrative for the water-flanked city, has been a cornerstone of The City's efforts to adopt a green-energy leadership role.
The City is planning two ocean power trials: One would anchor a field of submerged kelp-resembling devices 3˝ miles off Ocean Beach to capture Arctic storm-driven wave power; the other would place a turbine beneath the Golden Gate Bridge to harness moon-pulled tidal power.
An application to run up to three years of environmental and feasibility-related wave power studies in a 25-acre patch of sea off Ocean Beach was filed by San Francisco last year with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a U.S. Department of Energy agency.
After those studies, The City aims to install a trial wave-power plant at the site to create up to 3 megawatts of electricity, before ramping up the project to 100 megawatts, which is half of the electricity produced by the fossil fuel-burning power plant in Potrero Hill.
But the application was recently rejected, because responsibility for permitting renewable energy projects on the Outer Continental Shelf, which begins three miles offshore, will now be shared with the Minerals Management Service, a U.S. Department of Interior agency that regulates mining companies and collects lease payments from them.
The agency plans to require lease payments for the development of renewable-energy projects on the shelf.
Other organizations will be invited to competitively bid against San Francisco for the right to develop the patch of seabed off Ocean Beach as part of a process that could take several years, according to agency Renewable Energy Coordinator Maurice Hill.
If no other organizations bid, San Francisco will still be required to make annual lease payments, according to Hill.
Based on preliminary data published by the agency, The City's annual lease could reach $50,000, Renewable Energy Program Manager Johanna Partin told San Francisco's Environment Commission this week. "Which is $50,000 a year more than we were anticipating," she said.
The tidal-power project is unaffected by the changes. The City and its partners, including Pacific Gas & Electric Co., are waiting for approval of a permit application needed to move forward on that project.
Port gets funds to treat fish waste original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, April 28, 2009
Levels of disease-spreading bacteria created by waterborne seafood waste and animal droppings are expected to decline at a popular swimming spot during the next commercial fishing season.
Since the late 1980s, Dolphin Club members and other users of Aquatic Park have been pushing the Port of San Francisco to create a drainage system at nearby Fisherman's Wharf to funnel fish and crab waste into the sewer system, according to club member Meg Reilly. Funding for the project now appears to have been secured.
Meat, scales, slime, entrails and enzymes from fish and crustaceans currently washes directly into the Bay from fishing boats unloading at Pier 45 and from the pier's apron, where fishermen transfer freshly caught seafood to traders and processors.
Seals and gulls flock to the water around the pier to feast on the bountiful waste, and carry their droppings and leftover seafood scraps 1,000 yards west to Aquatic Park, according to Port engineering project manager John Mundy.
To protect the Bay and Aquatic Park from the waste, which spreads bacteria and smells like fish, the Port plans to install a new drainage system, including pumps, to channel it into The City's sewer system, where it would be treated with sewage before being poured offshore, according to Mundy.
A six-month construction effort is expected to employ up to 23 people and could begin in June, Mundy said.
The Port secured the $1.8 million needed for the project in November 2006 from the California Clean Beaches Initiative, but funds from that voter-approved initiative were frozen in December because of the economic and state budget crises, Port documents show.
Replacement funds were recently secured from the federal stimulus package, according to Dave Clegern, spokesman for the California Water Boards, which was charged with allocating some of the stimulus funds.
"As luck would have it, the project is also now eligible for its original grant money since the state has resumed bond sales," Clegern said in an e-mail Monday. "Pier 45 will not get money from both sources, but it will definitely get the cash required for the job."
Port Commissioners today are expected to vote to approve the use of the federal funds and to discuss potential opportunities to secure stimulus dollars for a long list of other Port projects.
Herring count nose-dives for second year
The number of herring swimming into the San Francisco Bay plummeted for the second consecutive year last winter, and the state is considering canceling the next commercial harvest.
The California Department of Fish and Game estimated that 145,000 tons of the baitfish swam into the Bay during the 2005 to 2006 winter spawning season. Last winter, roughly 4,900 tons swam into the Bay, preliminary department data shows.
The fish are caught before they lay their eggs by commercial fishermen using gillnets. Their eggs are harvested and exported to Japan, where they are a delicacy.
John Mello, a senior department biologist, said it's a "possibility" that the next commercial winter herring season will be canceled to help protect the population, which is a staple source of food for shorebirds and bigger fish.
Plans for Hunters Point Naval Shipyard revealed original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, April 7, 2009
Plans have been unveiled for the first homes to be built and sold as part of a redevelopment project of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. They reveal a modern industrial architectural style that's becoming more common in the Bay Area.
The proposed designs for two blocks of homes planned at the northwest entrance to the shuttered shipyard will be considered today by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency commissioners.
One of the blocks, on the north side of Innes Avenue between Donahue and Friedell streets, will become the site of 63 square-edged, predominantly white-and-gray, for-sale condominiums in a glass-covered, four-story building with covered private parking, a central courtyard and rooftop gathering space, the plans show.
On the other side of Innes Avenue, 25 for-sale townhomes painted with earth-toned colors will line opposite sides of a new alley, which will provide access to nonstreet-fronting ground-floor garages with 36 parking spaces.
An 18-month building effort could begin on both blocks by the end of the year, according to Jack Robertson, a vice president at Lennar Corp., which was appointed by The City as the project's master developer.
Prices of the market-rate homes will likely vary from $400,000 to $700,000, according to Robertson. Of the 88 units, 13 will be provided at lower prices for homeowners earning less than the area's average income.
Between 200 to 300 construction-related jobs could be created, and locals will be prioritized in the hiring process, Robertson said.
The 771-acre shipyard redevelopment project, which also encompasses the current site of Candlestick Park and other nearby land, is expected to take 10 to 20 years to complete. Plans call for eventually including parks, shops, offices, research space, more than 10,000 homes and, if the 49ers agree to remain in San Francisco, a new football stadium.
"We view these two blocks as the opening act for the shipyard," Robertson said. "These are going to serve, even after they're sold out, as models for the future blocks."
Architects and others involved in designing the project during a meeting with reporters Monday compared the blocks' designs with other Bay Area projects, including new housing in nearby Mission Bay, the Altaire project in Palo Alto and Blue Star Corner in Emeryville.
But the design team also said elements, including generous bay windows, were inspired by traditional San Francisco architecture, while the overarching industrial theme with square windows pays homage to the area's shipyard history.
Renters rejoice: Prices falling citywide original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, March 30, 2009
The weak economy is proving to be a blessing for still-employed renters who were forced to beg, line up and pay skyrocketing prices for apartments just six months ago.
Rents are tumbling as units are vacated by laid-off workers.
"We're running a vacancy rate which is unheard of in San Francisco," said Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association. "I don't know if rents have gone into a total free fall, but clearly they're coming down."
Property owners are having a difficult time renting higher-end apartments, according to New. At the lower end of the market, apartment owners are being worn down by longtime San Franciscans taking advantage of the weak market to move into better homes or new neighborhoods.
"There are clearly people moving within The City - hard bargainers who have been here for a while and know the drill," New said. "But we're not seeing people from outside coming into The City."
To fill empty units, owners of large apartment complexes are offering prospective tenants significant incentives, such as a month of free rent or free parking, according to Colliers International San Francisco broker Stephen Jackson. "Mom and pop" property owners will be forced to follow suit, he said.
"If you want to start negotiating your rent with your landlord, they're going to have to lower it," Jackson said. "Rents are dropping by $200 citywide."
The spike in vacancies is a likely harbinger of further declines in rent, according to Caroline Latham, owner of RealFacts, a San Francisco-based real estate research firm that's finalizing first-quarter data.
"People who were surveying said they hardly found any [units] with rents up, that a lot were unchanged and some were down. But overall, occupancy was down significantly," Latham said. "Occupancy is the predictor of what's going to happen to future [rent prices]."
Units are being vacated as laid-off workers move out of The City or into existing households with family members or friends, according to Latham and others.
"You can bet that household size is growing," Latham said.
An increasing number of tenants have been approaching the San Francisco Tenants Union for advice on breaking leases they can no longer afford, according to co-founder Ted Gullickson.
"In this economy, people may want to avoid locking themselves into a long-term lease," he said. "Rent control gives the same protections as any long-term lease."
Gullickson believes many of the tenants he meets plan to leave The City.
But San Francisco's chief economist, Ted Egan, said he's "somewhat skeptical" of the idea that laid-off residents are leaving The City in significant numbers.
"Where are people going to go that's any better?" Egan said in an e-mail. "We still have the strongest economy in California, and, while it's expensive to live here, unemployed people tend to want to be where the jobs are most likely to appear."
We're not going to pay
Tumbling San Francisco rental prices have created deals for those looking to move.
Source: Colliers International San Francisco
High-density housing planned in history-rich Dogpatch neighborhood original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, March 15, 2009
Plans in the Dogpatch area for a six-story residential building offer a glimpse into the industrial-history-steeped neighborhood's dense urban future, which will be reshaped under an exhaustive rezoning effort completed last year.
New building rules covering 2,200 acres of land in The City's east, including the Dogpatch, were approved by the Board of Supervisors in November. The so-called Eastern Neighborhoods Plan was crafted to protect some light industry while allowing more housing developments.
Developers have filed an application to build a 68-foot-tall building on an L-shape lot at the northwest corner of Third and 20th streets, where the height limit was previously 50 feet.
The building could contain as many as 62 residential units, ground-floor retail and a two-level subterranean parking garage, planning documents show. It would replace a parking lot and a 92-year-old, single-story commercial building.
The high-density project is appropriate for the location, said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, a think tank that deals with planning and transportation issues.
"When we built the Third Street light-rail line, the hope was that it would help attract investment like this," Metcalf said. "Hopefully, there will be more projects like this moving forward."
Curved elements in the building's facade evoke a streamlined look that was inspired by nearby nautical elements, such as cruise ships and historical ship-building operations, according to architect and developer Stephen Antonaros.
But the design didn't impress members of the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association when Antonaros presented it to them in the fall, according to President Susan Eslick.
Eslick said the association doesn't object to expected increases in the waterfront neighborhood's urban density, but she said Antonaros's project "felt massive in a way that we didn't feel was architecturally interesting."
The project's design failed to include sufficient public open space, more of which is needed in the neighborhood, Eslick said.
To address that concern, Antonaros said he will open the building's rear yard as a publicly accessible courtyard, where a mezzanine café will serve coffee.
But, he said, the project's high density is an inevitable consequence of the new zoning rules.
Construction of the project, which hasn't yet been approved by The City, might begin in several years, Antonaros said.
On the opposite side of Third Street, a planned 179-unit project will rise in some places to 65 feet, and homes are already selling in the recently completed 143-unit Esprit Park project at nearby 20th and Minnesota streets.
Bars, pubs going strong in down economy original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, March 9, 2009
In these economically sorrowful times, sorrow-drowning is serving as an economic salve.
Bars, pubs and other purveyors of intoxicating elixirs saw more job growth in the past year than any other business sector - even as most other businesses in San Francisco and San Mateo counties lost jobs.
New California Employment Development Department annual data reveals that the number of jobs in alcohol "drinking places" grew from 3,000 to 3,400 in the two counties from January 2008 to January 2009. That's a bigger job growth than any of the other 94 business sectors tracked.
Most of those jobs were added in the first nine months of 2008, before the economy tanked, according to Terrance Alan, a bar and strip-club owner who sits on The City's Entertainment Commission.
But even after the meltdown, people have continued to party.
"People are still going out and people are still drinking, but there are changes to their behavior," Alan said.
"The 80 percent that still go out spend about half of what they used to," he said. "The challenge is to keep the late-night entertainment experience high-quality when the revenue that you're used to has been cut."
Bars and clubs are slashing their covers and offering better drink specials, according to Alan.
"You've got the same demands on your security and door staff, your facility undergoes the same wear and tear - but you have less revenue," Alan said.
Although few bars are currently hiring, most are maintaining their staff and replacing hospitality workers after they quit, he said.
Meanwhile, sectors hit hardest by job losses last year were in the troubled lending industry, which triggered the economic malaise through its overlending practices.
The nondepository credit intermediation industry, which includes issuers of product financing and credit cards, lost one-fifth of its jobs last year, with employment declining from 3,600 jobs in January 2008 to 2,800 in January 2009.
The construction industry was also hit hard, shedding 13 percent of its employees, or 5,700 jobs.
Growth and decline of jobs in San Francisco and San Mateo counties
Brightest industries
Darkest industries
*Figures from January 2008 to January 2009
Source: California Employment Development Department
Revamped Metreon slated to be restaurant-centric original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, March 4, 2009
The cavernous electronics-dominated Metreon complex could be reborn as a vibrant restaurant- and retail-focused destination under a planned overhaul approved Tuesday.
Sony recently sold the four-story mall and announced it would close the flagship PlayStation and Sony stores inside.
San Francisco Redevelopment Agency commissioners on Tuesday evening unanimously approved plans by new owners Westfield Group and Forest City Enterprises to rearrange the building to better integrate it with the booming museum district neighborhood in SoMa.
Under the approved plans, shops and restaurants will line the outer perimeter of the ground floor; popular New York restaurant Tavern on the Green will occupy the top floor; a food terrace will face Yerba Buena Gardens; and lights will colorfully illuminate the Fourth Street facade.
The successful cinema complex will remain on the third floor.
The San Francisco Filipino Cultural Center will lease space on the third floor, where it will set up its events and administrative headquarters.
The entrance will be moved from the corner of Fourth and Mission streets to the middle of the block on Fourth Street.
"There are teenage boys weeping all over The City about the demise of the PlayStation store," Commissioner Francee Covington said during the hearing. "But I think the new retail outlets coming in will be fabulous, and having the entrance off of the street is going to be wonderful, because that entrance has always been a tunnel."
The corporate might of the mall's new owners, which also operate the nearby Westfield-branded San Francisco Centre on Market Street, has helped them secure otherwise-elusive financing needed to begin construction in spring, according to Amy Neches, project manager for the Redevelopment Agency, which owns and governs the land.
New storefronts are expected to open in time for the 2010 end-of-year shopping season, and jobs are expected to more than double to 1,100. San Francisco residents will be prioritized in the hiring process, according to Neches.
Terminal project ousts tenants original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 13, 2009
Rose-sharing romantics, art aficionados and late-night loungers will see cherished boutique businesses disappear from their SoMa locations under government plans to raze land for a new transit terminal.
Three chic hotspots on Natoma Street are among the dozens of businesses that will be evicted this year by the $1.2 billion project to rebuild the Transbay Transit Terminal at First and Mission streets - and surround it with homes, stores and office towers.
Zebulon restaurant and bar, John Colins Lounge and Varnish Fine Art gallery, bar and event space are among 33 SoMa businesses and nonprofits that the Transbay Joint Powers Authority will evict from properties it purchased for the terminal project, documents show.
"They're taking a space away from us that is irreplaceable," said John Colins co-owner John Giuffre. The bar will move this spring from its elegant home of nearly four years - a freestanding, two-story red-brick, sky-lighted building - into the ground floor of a 10-story building on Minna Street, Giuffre said.
Others to be evicted include leasees of office space, parking lot operators, an additional restaurant/bar and a flower shop housed in a ramshackle wooden shed in front of the existing terminal.
Flower vendor Salvador Reynoso said he has been told he probably has until October to shut down shop or find a new location for his business, which was founded by his uncle 20 years ago.
Businesses on Natoma Street, east of Second Street, will likely be cleared out in the second half of this year, according to Transbay Joint Powers Authority project manager Robert Beck.
The one-way lane will instead be used as a car-free retail strip to serve inhabitants of the 39 new residential buildings planned around the terminal, according to Beck.
The project is expected to be completed by 2014.
As required by state and federal laws, all displaced businesses will receive financial assistance - expected to total $1.8 million - according to Beck. That averages out to about $54,000 per business.
Still, not all businesses are going quietly.
Varnish hosted a petition-signing event Thursday to fight its pending displacement.
"Our goal has been to remain open at our current location as long as we possibly can, and then open within a couple of weeks at a new location," co-owner Jen Rogers said. "We want desperately to stay where we are."
Rogers said she opened Varnish in April 2003 with her business partner, Kerri Stephens, after seismically retrofitting and refurbishing the two-story building, and found out one month later that their future at the location was doomed.
Coast Guard adds machine guns to helicopters original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 3, 2009
The four Coast Guard helicopters that patrol San Francisco's shoreline have been replaced with stealthier and better-armored choppers that, for the first time, can be armed with machine guns.
The Coast Guard is replacing its national fleet of orange-and-white helicopters under one of the post-9/11 programs started by the Bush administration to better militarize the agency.
The four new MH-65C Dolphin helicopters, which are stationed near San Francisco International Airport, are upgraded versions of the aircraft they replaced.
The new helicopters will not be armed all the time, but they will provide armed escorts to arriving and departing cruise ships, according to Adm. Paul Zukunft.
They will be available in the event of a terrorist threat, such as the one that killed 17 sailors aboard a Navy destroyer in 2000 in a Yemeni port, according to Zukunft. He commands the 11th Coast Guard District, which spans four states and thousands of miles of ocean.
"A concern of ours would be an attack much like the USS Cole - not just against a military vessel, but also a passenger vessel," Zukunft said.
To help pay for new equipment, weapons and agents, the annual budget for the agency increased from $3.9 billion before 9/11 to more than $9 billion sought in 2009, according to figures published by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The helicopters are used because it's safer to fire bullets down into the water from a helicopter near a city than horizontally from a boat, in part because bullets can bounce like skipped stones on water, according to Zukunft.
Bullets fired from the M240 machine guns used by the Coast Guard have ranges of 2.5 miles, Zukunft said.
Accurately shooting at adversarial watercraft is a challenge from a helicopter, according to San Francisco-based Cmdr. Sam Creech, who for 19 years has piloted Coast Guard helicopters.
"Our marksmen are pretty highly trained," Creech said. "Not only are the boats moving, but the helicopter is moving."
The Coast Guard this week is using a helicopter-mounted machine gun loaded with blanks in "judgmental training" sessions in San Pablo Bay, according to Creech.
The training was on full display Monday morning when a three-person helicopter crew hovered over a faux-rogue Coast Guard dinghy filled with pretend terrorists wielding fake weapons.
The boat and its four-person, paramilitary-garbed crew were part of the Coast Guard's Maritime Safety and Security Team - which is similar to a SWAT team, according to Creech.
The helicopter swung clockwise around the boat, with its machine gun hanging out of the right-hand side and kept pointed at the boat.
Eventually, the hazy sky filled with the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire for the training exercise.
Heavy machinery: The firearms the new Coast Guard helicopters can carry are anything but lightweight.
Source: Product specifications published by GlobalSecurity.org
Water troubles trickle down original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 22, 2009
Water that has flowed from the Sierra Nevada to taps in San Francisco and the Peninsula is set to triple in price as supply becomes more scarce, demand increases and billions are spent protecting the system from earthquakes.
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is currently negotiating future water rates and supply with its wholesale customers, which include 25 cities and water districts and two private utilities in San Mateo, Alameda and Santa Clara counties.
A 25-year contract with wholesale customers - which account for about two-thirds of water use - expires in June.
Although representatives from both sides - the PUC and the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency, which is representing the wholesale customers - are tight-lipped about specifics of the negotiations, PUC General Manager Ed Harrington said the new contract will encourage water conservation through incentives and surcharges.
"What we have in the contract are incentives - some might call them penalties," Harrington said. "Should we use more than [an average 265 million gallons a day], then we're going to collect a surcharge, and that surcharge will go to help the river and do environmentally good things."
A plan for Hetch Hetchy upgrades locked in a cap until 2018 on the average amount of water that can be drawn daily from The City's watersheds.
Although the cap is higher than the amount of water presently used, it's 7 percent less than the amount expected to be needed by PUC customers in 2018, given population growth and development in the Bay Area, agency figures show.
Most of the water comes from O'Shaughnessy Dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which is filled mostly by melted snow - although that is becoming more sparse.
Compounding the woes of the projected water shortage, the PUC is set to increase water rates to help fund a $4.3 billion project to protect its pipes and some of its dams from earthquakes.
A San Francisco household that currently pays $63 a month in water bills, which includes the cost to treat water flushed back down the drains, can expect to pay $129 by 2018, according to PUC Deputy General Manager Michael Carlin. That increase will also fund a $3.2 billion project to improve The City's sewer system.
Wholesale users can expect to see the price of Hetch Hetchy water more than triple, Carlin said.
Art Jensen, who's leading negotiations on behalf of the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency, spoke during an October PUC hearing of the "serious concern" harbored by its 27 member agencies about the implementation of the cap, meeting minutes show.
He was joined at that meeting by officials from Burlingame, Redwood City, East Palo Alto and other cities, who said they were already working on conservation efforts and could not afford water limits.
A representative from the Santa Clara Water District expressed concerns that restrictions would have a severe impact on the economies of local communities.
Many of those 27 agencies have started warning customers of increasing water costs and also of expected restrictions on supplies, although they can't say for sure how much prices will rise.
Milpitas has warned its customers to expect two consecutive years of 9 percent increases, according to Mayor Robert Livengood.
The Coastside County Water District is struggling to meet demand for water from its customers in Half Moon Bay and elsewhere, as its water sources, including Hetch Hetchy, are being stretched to the limit, according to board member Chris Mickelsen.
"So far, we've been able to keep our rate increases in the single-digit range," he said. "In the next few years, it's going to start getting painful."
Peninsula water customers have negotiating strength
More than 100 years ago, when Congress granted The City the right to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a reservoir, several Peninsula cities gave influential support to the project.
By the 1960s, those wholesale customers outside San Francisco had banded together to form the Bay Area Water Users Association.
About 10 years later, the association backed a suit in federal court against The City, claiming rate discrimination since a proposed increase by the Board of Supervisors would impose higher water rates for wholesale customers outside San Francisco.
Wholesale customers won an injunction against the rate increases.
"The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal affirmed, holding that the 'Bay Cities,' as it referred to the plaintiffs, were co-grantees, along with San Francisco, in the rights granted under the Raker Act," according to the Web site for the organization, now known as the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency.
A long-term settlement with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission that included a 25-year contract settled the rate lawsuit in 1984.
That contract is set to expire in June.
"The communities in which two-thirds of water is used have no political representation in San Francisco, and San Francisco itself is not subject to oversight by the California Public Utilities Commission, as any investor-owned utility would be," according to the water agency. "In terms of the many wholesale customers who are entirely dependent on the San Francisco regional system, the SFPUC is, in effect, an unregulated monopoly."
SFPUC General Manager Ed Harrington said the settlement will continue to prevent The City from increasing wholesale rates for other Bay Area users more steeply than in-city retail rates. If San Francisco tried, wholesale customers could reinstate a legal claim of partial ownership of the Hetch Hetchy dam, according to Harrington.
"What The City used to do was just charge [wholesale customers] whatever it wanted," Harrington said. "All the Bay Area customers got together and sued us, and we're not allowed to do that, unless we want to go back to court."
Conservation efforts necessary to close water-supply gap
To close the gap between water supply and the expected demand in coming years, more conservation measures - such as recycling treated sewage for irrigation and using low-flow bathroom fixtures - will be needed, according to San Francisco Public Utilities Commission officials.
"We don't have the right to simply take as much water as we feel like if it's going to have a negative impact on fish life and other people," said Ed Harrington, general manager of the SFPUC. "We have a responsibility to be good stewards."
To help manage the limited water supply, several agencies using wholesale water said they might end up selling their allocation to one another if one user is able to conserve and another is not, but is able to afford extra water.
The cap-and-trade system is supported by such water watchdogs as the nonprofit Tuolomne River Trust, according to Bay Area Program Director Peter Drekmeier.
"It might be that one community can implement conservation and recycling programs cheaper than another community," Drekmeier said. "It's a mechanism to encourage more innovation."
The Old College try
Stanford University, which is allocated a maximum 3 million gallons of Public Utilities Commission water per day, has reduced its use from 2.7 million gallons in 2000 to 2.3 million in 2008, according to university documents. It has replaced more than 10,000 bathroom fixtures, created a "water-wise" demonstration garden and introduced guidelines for efficient fountains, among other measures.
Facts and figures about the current and future demand of the SFPUC's wholesale water
Source: Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Wholesale customers who buy their water from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Source: Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency
Treasure Island to be protected from rising seas original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 21, 2009
Dirt and other fill may be piled onto parts of Treasure Island to protect planned buildings from sea level rise due to climate change and other factors.
A multibillion-dollar plan for the 450-acre man-made island - including a ferry terminal, retail strip, three hotels and 6,000 new housing units, including a 60-story residential tower - was adopted in 2006 by The City.
But the low-lying island is vulnerable to floods if seas rise due to climate change, according to Kheay Loke, a developer with Wilson Meany Sullivan, which is partnering with Lennar Corp. on the project.
The flood risk will be greatest if rising seas coincide with a high tide and large storm, according to Loke.
Loke and a handful of engineers and city officials presented options last week to the Treasure Island Development Authority Board of Directors for protecting new buildings against climate change-related flooding.
To protect new buildings from floods, fill will likely be dumped beneath planned development sites, according to Loke.
The fill will be excavated from some of the 300 acres of island that's slated to be used for parkland and sports fields, and additional fill will be imported to the island, according to Loke.
"It's all about raising grades to enable gravity drainage, as opposed to relying on levees for protection," Loke said.
The developers could also choose to build sea walls - which would serve the same function as levees in the Central Valley and New Orleans - around the island to protect against flooding, authority documents show.
The Board of Supervisors will ultimately decide how to protect the island from a potential 3-foot sea level rise over 70 years, according to Jack Sylvan, who oversees public-private partnership projects for The City.
Property taxes could be set aside to build sea walls, or take other flood-protection measures, if seas rise more than expected, according to Sylvan.
"The City is working on how it will address sea level rise in the future, assuming it does in fact happen," Sylvan said.
Infrastructure work, including grading and seawalls, could begin by late 2010, according to Sylvan. Building construction is expected to start 18 to 24 months later, he said.
Bay Area looks to draw water straight from the Bay original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 15, 2009
A long-running plan to keep millions of Bay Area residents with drinkable water during a water crisis such as a drought or disaster by desalting sea and river water is coming up against funding obstacles due to California's budget crisis.
San Franciscans enjoy some of California's cleanest water - fresh snowmelt that gushes through a labyrinth of pipes from the Sierra Mountains down to The City. But San Francisco'slong distance from its dams leaves its water supply vulnerable to earthquakes, and its reliance on snowmelt leaves its thirst at the mercy of the warming globe, which is reducing snowpacks.
In October, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and three other local water agenciesbegan a $2 million desalination experiment in the East Bay to see whether they could affordably remove enough salt from brackish estuaries or from the sea to provide emergency drinking water to their 5 million water customers.
Desalination turns salty water into fresh drinking water. In desalination plants, the water is forced at high pressure through a filter, known as a membrane, through which water molecules can pass but salt cannot.
In the Bay Area, desalination efforts are under way next to an estuary in Bay Point, where a $2 million, six-month pilot project was started in October by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and three other local water agencies.
The first round of experiments at the pilot plant concluded in December.
"The very preliminary results show that it's working," said Hasan Abdullah, desalination coordinator at the East Bay Municipal Utility District, one of San Francisco's partners in the project. "I'd be surprised if we find that it doesn't achieve our water quality goals."
One of the purposes of the pilot project is to test different membranes to see how well they filter salt out of brackish Delta water, where salinity levels fluctuate massively by the hour, season and year, according to project manager Mari Valmores of the Contra Costa Water District, which is overseeing the experiment in eastern Contra Costa County.
The pilot project is being funded with $1 million in grants from the California Department of Water Resources, and with $250,000 apiece in cash or in-kind services from each of the participating local agencies.
Desalination plants have been used in rain-poor, energy-rich countries in the Middle East for decades, according to John MacHarg, founder of Affordable Desalination Collaboration, an industry group representing desalination companies.
Within the last decade, the technology has been improving and spreading worldwide as demand for freshwater has been growing, according to MacHarg.
New desalination efforts are under way or under investigation around the world, including in Australia, Algeria, China and Singapore, and in a growing number of California cities and counties, including San Diego, Marin, Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, according to MacHarg.
But uncertainty about California's chronic budget deficit is clouding the future of public works projects, which could include desalination projects, according to California Department of Water Resources spokesman Don Strickland.
"The state's Pooled Money Investment Board voted to freeze certain disbursements, and this could potentially include grant funds for water desalination projects," Strickland said in an e-mail. "It may be necessary to temporarily suspend payments."
If funding for the desalination project from California evaporates, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission hopes the agencies can secure funding under the economic stimulus plan championed by President-elect Barack Obama, according to Michael Carlin, General Manager of SFPUC Water Enterprise.
If the pilot project is successful, the SFPUC could build a desalination plant by itself or, preferably, in conjunction with other local agencies by 2012, according to Carlin. Sites being considered are inside and outside of The City, where salty water would be harvested from the ocean, Bay or Delta.
The plant, once built, would operate slowly around-the-clock to ensure that it's ready to be quickly used in a crisis, according to Carlin.
The proposed plant would desalt 65 million gallons of water per day and cost up to $400 millionto build and up to $47 million a year to operate,SFPUC figures show. Results from the pilot project will help refine those cost estimates.
Although the water produced by the plant wouldn't taste as good as snowmelt, it would be safe to drink, according to Carlin.
Mobile unit will dispense water during emergency
When an earthquake or other disaster wreaks havoc with San Francisco's water supply, The City's water agency will be ready with a $500,000 mobile water treatment and bagging machine to ensure a drinkable water supply.
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission bought the trailer-mounted emergency water distribution unit last year using U.S. Department of Homeland Security funds, according to SFPUC water manager Michael Carlin.
"We can hook it up to a water source and start bagging water in tough plastic bags," Carlin said. "Then we can hand them out just like bottled water."
The unit can draw water out of water hydrants or from reservoirs, such as Lake Merced, and it's equipped with ozone- and ultraviolet-light-based disinfecting equipment that can be powered using a back-up generator, agency documents show.
Sites identified as possible plant locations
The Bay Area's four largest water agencies are jointly exploring a regional desalination project that would provide an additional water source for the region:
Contra Costa Water District
East Bay Municipal Utility District
San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Santa Clara Valley Water District
Breaking down the Bay Area project
According to officials, if the pilot project is successful, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission hopes to build a desalination plant by 2012.
By the numbers
Police test ShotSpotter in the Mission original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 19, 2008
The all-too-familiar sound of gunfire that erupted in the Mission district Thursday night rang in the launch of the newest crime-fighting tool for the violence-plagued neighborhood.
The shots were fired from handguns by police officers - at a stack of bulletproof vests - to test, calibrate and fine-tune roughly 20 sound sensors that will allow police to monitor gunfire in a square mile of the Mission. The area is part of Mission Police Station's jurisdiction, which has accounted for 45 homicides since 2006.
Residents were warned just prior to the tests through megaphone-blasted alerts from squad cars and by street closures.
At 9:28 p.m., the first test proved successful when Officer Charles Bonicci fired and the system picked it up, according to police Lt. Mikail Ali.
Police won't tell the public which parts of the Mission will be monitored, but the locations of Thursday's four tests offer some clues: the first one at 18th and Lexington streets; 22nd and Bartlett streets at 9:47 p.m.; 23rd Street and Treat Avenue at 10:02 p.m.; and 18th and Bryant streets at 10:20 p.m.
The final test at 18th and Bryant was the only one to prove unsuccessful, but police still officially started using the ShotSpotter system afterward to monitor the neighborhood for the telltale acoustic signature of gunfire, Ali said. An additional sensor will be added in that area to solve the problem, he said.
The $200,000 system, purchased with state grants, could help police solve crimes, but it won't be as helpful at preventing crimes, according to Mission station Capt. Stephen Tacchini. The City is nearing 100 homicides this year, after a decade high of 98 in 2007.
"It's a detection system," Tacchini said. "It's not a preventative measure by any means."
ShotSpotter, which was invented by a group of Stanford research scientists in the 1990s, is also being used by 32 other cities, according to company spokesman Gregg Rowland.
It is also currently in use in the Western Addition neighborhood and Bayview District.
ShotSpotter uses pizza-size audio sensors and trigonometry-based calculations using the speed of sound to alert police to the precise location of a shooting or explosion, according to Rowland.
Between March and September, a ShotSpotter system that monitors 1.3 square miles of Bayview alerted police to 166 instances of gunfire, helping lead to the June arrest on Cashmere Street of an Antioch man who fired a stolen pistol, according to Ali.
It also helped police find evidence they might not have found for the investigation of a March 9 homicide, because the slain victim died hundreds of feet from where he was shot, according to Ali. Since the crime has not been solved, he would not say what evidence was found.
ShotSpotter might be added to other neighborhoods if funding grants can be secured, according to Ali.
Where the wild shots are
ShotSpotter is currently being used in the Bayview district and Western Addition neighborhood. It was launched in the Mission district Thursday night.
Bayview district figures for March 7 through Sept. 20:
1.3 Square miles monitored
166 Instances of gunfire detected by ShotSpotter
21 Instances of gunfire reported to police by citizens
1 Homicide detected by ShotSpotter
1 Attempted homicide detected by ShotSpotter
1 Arrest due to ShotSpotter
Western Addition figures for April 11 through Oct. 21:
1 Square mile monitored
89 Instances of gunfire detected by ShotSpotter
34 Instances of gunfire reported to police by citizens
2 Homicides detected by ShotSpotter
1 Attempted homicide detected by ShotSpotter
1 Arrest due to ShotSpotter
Source: Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice
Empty offices build up in city original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 18, 2008
Companies in San Francisco are searching for subtenants to lease 800,000 square feet of office space that has been abandoned and left empty, a barren manifestation of job losses across The City.
According to city statistics, 8,200 workers have lost their jobs this year in San Francisco. About 10 percent of jobs in The City are in the financial sector, which is experiencing job losses in the wake of defaults and foreclosures caused by overlending.
The recent collapse of two big law firms has dumped a substantial amount of office space onto the market, according to tenant broker Frank Fudem.
"If you're a landlord, it's getting a lot worse," Fudem said.
Gift retailer Red Envelope is searching for subtenants for its six-story SoMa headquarters, because it was acquired in June by Provide Commerce, which is shifting its newly owned company to San Diego, according to spokeswoman Karen Behrman.
However, in a speech about the economy posted on YouTube as part of his State of The City address, Mayor Gavin Newsom was upbeat about consistent growth in the amount of overall office space leased in San Francisco in recent months and years.
"This has been a remarkable run," he said.
Vacancy rates affect city revenue, because they can impact property values for tax-assessment purposes and because full offices pay higher payroll and utility taxes, according to City Controller Ben Rosenfield.
Total office space available for lease in San Francisco recently surpassed 10 million square feet, as companies collapsed or laid off staff and as newly built office space came onto the market, according to Jesse Gundersheim, Grubb & Ellis Co. research analyst.
The glut of space drove down the average amount companies are paying per square foot from $46 in July to $38 in October, and further decreases are expected, according to Gundersheim.
The precise market value of office space is difficult to assess right now, because few deals are being signed, Gundersheim said.
There is currently 2 million square feet of office space available for sublease in San Francisco, including 810,000 square feet that is currently vacant, according to figures provided by Tove Nilsen, director of Market Research at Colliers International. More than 500,000 square feet has been left vacant since July, Nilsen said.
There's about 80 million square feet of office space in The City.
The holiday season combined with the recession is making it difficult for brokers to find tenants, according to Colliers International broker Mike Monroe.
"The holidays is typically a slower period for us," he said.
Company seeks community support for new utility boxes original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 16, 2008
AT&T is pitching the promise of "next generation" Internet and television services for San Franciscans in an effort to win support for unpopular plans to bolt hundreds of 4-foot high utility boxes onto sidewalks and other rights-of-way throughout The City.
Specific locations have not been identified for most of the 850 planned metal boxes, but they would be built close to existing AT&T utility boxes, planning department documents show.
Additionally, some of AT&T's existing boxes would be expanded, and some would be moved from utility poles to footpaths.
The new equipment would house technology to support the company's U-verse service, which already provides 20 megabit-per-second, faster service to around 200 Californian cities, according to company spokesman Gordon Diamond.
The technology inside the boxes would support Internet protocol-based television, telephone and web services, he said, adding that installing the boxes above-ground keeps equipment dry and accessible.
San Francisco Beautiful, a city nonprofit, has called on the company to follow the example of Comcast, the cable and Internet service provider, and install its boxes on private property, but Diamond dismissed that suggestion.
"Our equipment has always been placed in the public rights-of-way," Diamond said. "Our new cabinets must be located close to our existing cabinets."
This is not the company's first attempt to receive approval for the utility boxes.
During a July Board of Supervisors meeting, the telecommunications giant withdrew its proposal to install the boxes, and pledged to submit a new plan, after lawmakers said they planned to order the Planning Department to conduct a full investigation into the impacts of the proposal.
The department had originally ruled that approval of the proposal would not require completion of an environmental impact report - a process required by California law for all major projects.
At a meeting attended by more than 60 speakers, many affiliated with neighborhood groups, the supervisors indicated they would overrule the Planning Department's decision.
Opponents to the utility boxes say they are too big, would be visually unappealing, and would attract graffiti and illegal advertisements.
Although the company has not yet released a revised proposal, in recent weeks AT&T has held community meetings to talk about the utility boxes, and feedback gathered during the meetings will be used to refine the company's upgrade plans, according to Diamond, who said he didn't know when a new application to install the utility boxes would be filed.
Two final workshops are scheduled for 7 p.m. today at the Northern Police Station and 7 p.m. Wednesday at Fort Mason Center Building C, Diamond said.
Rents decline for first time since 2004 original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 10, 2008
Rental prices for apartments in The City, which had been skyrocketing for nearly two years, fell in October, as an avalanche of pink slips across San Francisco weighed on average household incomes and led freshly unemployed workers to abandon city living, new figures show.
The average rent for a one-bedroom unit advertised on craigslist.org fell 2.4 percent in one month to $2,293, according to the city controller's October economic barometer report, released this week. That price, however, was still 3.7 percent higher than at the same time last year.
San Francisco rents started falling in October and continued to fall in November, according to Victor Calanog, senior economist at national research firm Reis Inc.
Rents had not previously fallen since 2004, according to San Francisco chief economist Ted Egan. During most of the current economic downturn, rents have risen as potential home buyers have remained renters while waiting for prices to bottom out, according to Egan.
However, 1,600 people lost their jobs in San Francisco in October, taking the number of jobs lost in 2008 to 8,200, driving some residents out of The City and pushing down the amount people will pay to rent, according to Egan.
Additionally, about 400 city workers will soon be laid off, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday.
If rents do not quickly rebound, then they will probably continue to fall until the recession ends, according to Egan.
Some property owners are leaving units vacant and hoping the rental market will strengthen, rather than locking themselves into current prices, according to San Francisco Apartment Association Executive Director Janan New.
Cleaning up: City hopes to cash in on clean-tech original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 4, 2008
Buried among the hoopla, superlatives and expletives that filled the streets and airwaves following President-elect Barack Obama's Nov. 4 victory was a 10-word statement that could foreshadow an economic bonanza for an industry that's beginning to emerge in The City.
Eight minutes into Obama's victory speech, he unwound his momentarily clasped hands: "There's new energy to harness," he said, shaking his fingers up and down. "New jobs to be created."
Local officials have a unique chance to position San Francisco - long a pastureland of grass-roots environmental entrepreneurialism and activism - to cash in on a green economy, if Obama's energy policies burst into bureaucratic reality, experts say.
The City in recent years has attracted more than 100 so-called clean-tech firms that, although diverse, base their business models on meeting a shared demand: arresting and healing the environmental harms wrought by wastefulness, pollution and climate change.
These environmentally focused startup companies, mature businesses and nonprofits - covering everything from legal firms to green construction consultants to carbon offset traders to solar panel installers - are the seedlings of an emerging clean-tech industry.
Clean-tech firms and other companies accounted for 750,000 green jobs nationwide in 2006, including nearly 14,000 in San Francisco, according to an October report prepared for the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The firms employ a diverse group of workers, including machinists, scientists and businesspeople.
The City is working to create office and laboratory space for the industry in eastern neighborhoods, including a large incubator facility planned at the redeveloped Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, said Michael Cohen, chief economic adviser to Mayor Gavin Newsom.
"We recognized fairly early on that San Francisco was a rather natural fit to be a leader in the green or clean-tech industry," Cohen said. "It's that confluence of financial savvy, technological savvy, creativity and the public good which is quintessentially San Franciscan."
San Francisco has worked to attract the industry to The City by offering payroll tax exemptions for particular types of clean-tech companies with between 10 and 100 employees, according to Cohen, but figures show just two companies claimed the exemption last year. A Board of Supervisors committee Wednesday recommended expanding the type and size of firms that qualify for the exemption.
San Francisco's strict environmental laws, including nation-leading packaging and green-construction requirements, provide San Francisco-based clean-tech companies with a local test market for their products, according to Cohen.
More than two-thirds of the clean-tech firms in the Bay Area are working on projects that could help tackle climate change, according to figures in a September report by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. Areas of high interest include creating non- or low-carbon-emitting power, developing ways of using less energy, and sucking airborne carbon back into the earth.
Of the 425 Bay Area clean-tech firms identified in SPUR's report, 119 were based in San Francisco.
"Companies in this industry are emerging and dying on a daily basis," said report author Egon Terplan, a policy director for SPUR.
If city officials play their cards right, San Francisco could become the hub of a high-growth, high-employment clean-tech industry - but if they fail, that mantle could go to another Bay Area city, just as Silicon Valley dragged the technology industry's center of gravity south to the Peninsula, according to Terplan.
The local clean-tech industry is expected to receive a major boost from a plan for a cap-and-trade program designed to slow climate change, outlined by Obama during his campaign and reiterated in statements following his election.
Under Obama's plan, the federal government would auction off the right to emit a limited amount of climate-changing carbon. Money raised annually, $15 billion, would be loaned or given to alternative energy and energy conservation entrepreneurs, and used for other energy initiatives such as green-collar job training and home insulation.
Alternative energy would become increasingly competitive under Obama's system, because it would be subsidized by increases in the price of fossil fuels, which most Americans currently rely on, according to Keith Schneider, spokesman for the San Francisco-based Apollo Alliance, a clean-energy policy group co-founded by Obama campaign adviser Dan Carol.
The alliance, however, is pushing for a $50 billion a year investment in clean energy - more than three times the amount pledged by Obama - but it is nonetheless supportive of the president-elect's plan.
"In this country, we've talked for years about a balance between the economy and the environment," Schneider said. "Obama said, 'No, we're tilting our economic development strategy towards the environment.' That's huge."
Promised training academy still without home in The City
SolarCity's plans to create a solar panel work force training academy in the Bayview district are languishing, five months after the Board of Supervisors approved a solar subsidy program demanded by the company.
In April, amid intense lobbying of supervisors by The City's solar power industry, SolarCity Chief Executive Lindon Rive issued an ultimatum: Unless a solar subsidy program proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom in late 2007 was quickly approved, the company would shift a planned training academy from the Bayview to another Bay Area city.
The academy would train at least 30 solar panel installers every two months for $1,000 apiece, with graduates offered jobs paying $15 to $25 per hour, Rive said.
In June, supervisors approved a $3 million subsidy program worth up to $6,000 per home.
The incentive program has helped SolarCity sell panel arrays to 74 homes under a zero-down financing plan, but the company hasn't identified a location for its proposed academy, according to Rive, who said the board's feet-dragging caused the delay.
"We will need a training academy, but moving into a new facility takes months," Rive said.
Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, who opposed the subsidy program because it would drain money from city-owned renewable power projects, downplayed the importance of the academy and said it should be called an apprenticeship program.
"They want to get themselves some cheap labor," McGoldrick said.
Working for the environment
Green jobs could be found across the country in 2006.
United States: 751,051
New York: 25,021
Washington, D.C.: 24,287
Houston: 21,250
Los Angeles: 20,136
Boston: 19,799
Chicago: 16,120
Philadelphia: 14,379
San Francisco: 13,848
San Diego: 11,663
Pittsburgh: 9,627
Source: U.S. Conference of Mayors
Job concentration
Clean-tech firms based in San Francisco:
31: Finance
27: Green building and design
18: Energy and environmental consulting
16: Energy generation
7: Clean transportation
6: Air, water and environment
6: Trading offsets
3: Energy efficiency
2: Recycling and waste
1: Energy infrastructure and storage
Source: San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association
Transbay Terminal targets stimulus cash original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Nov. 27, 2008
A bus terminal in San Francisco might be flattened by the federal government.
Demolition of the Transbay Transit Terminal is one of the public-works projects identified as a candidate for assistance under a stimulus bill before Congress.
The Job Creation and Unemployment Relief Act - one of the spending-heavy bills written by federal lawmakers to help save jobs and companies amid an economic collapse sparked by overlending in the finance sector - passed the House in September and is waiting for a Senate vote.
If it becomes law, the bill would pump tens of billions of dollars into municipal infrastructure projects in an effort to create jobs and invigorate the economy.
Officials in San Francisco are currently cataloging employment-generating projects that could qualify for funding under the proposal. To qualify, projects must create lots of jobs and begin within four months.
"There are a number of city projects that would score very well under the criteria that's being considered by the Senate," said Michael Cohen, chief economic adviser to Mayor Gavin Newsom. "Among those is the Transbay Terminal."
The bill might be signed into law at a fortuitous moment for the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, the multiagency body overseeing the planned rebuild of the terminal at First and Mission streets.
Construction of a temporary terminal southeast of the permanent location began this month, the first phase in a six-year project to tear down the existing terminal and replace it with a modern facility flanked and funded by new homes and a 1,000-foot office tower. Officials hope to eventually extend the Caltrain line from Mission Bay to the terminal.
The Joint Powers Authority might ask for more than $200 million under the stimulus bill, according to figures provided by finance consultant Nancy Whelan. Projects identified include the $23 million construction of a temporary terminal, the $22 million demolition of the existing terminal and a $62 million effort to relocate underground utilities.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has identified more than $500 million worth of potentially eligible projects, including $270 million for a new control center, according to spokeswoman Kristen Holland.
The San Francisco Unified School District would likely seek federal funding under the stimulus plan to improve classroom energy efficiency, modernize science and engineering labs, and improve computers and internet connections, according to spokeswoman Gentle Blythe.
Stimulus candidates
Projects in The City that might qualify for federal funding under a proposed job-creation bill:
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency
New control center: $270 million
Traffic system that prioritizes transit over cars: $215 million
Pedestrian signals, including 400 with countdown clocks and 200 with audible tones: $4 million
Transbay Joint Powers Authority
Architecture and design services: $63 million
Construction management services: $30 million
Construction of a temporary transit terminal: $23 million
Demolition of existing terminal: $22 million
San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Earthquake-protected water tunnel in San Mateo County: $33 million
Ultraviolet system to disinfect drinking water: $8 million
Sources: Municipal Transportation Agency, Transbay Joint Powers Authority, Public Utilities Commission
Global downturn hits Bay Area businesses original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Nov. 20, 2008
Businesses in San Francisco have been hit hard by the global economic malaise, with new figures showing Bay Area business optimism has sunk to new lows and more than one-third of companies in The City expect to shed staff before June.
The Bay Area Council, a big-business-funded public policy organization, released quarterly figures this week that suggest a Bay Area-wide slump in business confidence will affect job security most severely in San Francisco and San Mateo County.
Across the Bay Area, 47 percent of companies expect conditions in their industries to worsen during the next six months, according to figures in the 13-page report.
"A lot of people have been hoping that the recession and the downturn would pass by the Bay Area," council spokesman John Grubb said. "We're not going to escape that fate."
Bay Area business confidence in November reached its lowest point since the group began surveying chief executives four times a year in 2001, figures show.
The industries with the bleakest job outlooks include the construction and transportation sector - with 60 percent of Bay Area firms expecting to reduce their work force in the next six months - along with the retail and financial services sectors, according to the report.
U.S. Census data show 10 percent of employees in San Francisco and San Mateo County work in the financial sector, which is experiencing consolidations and layoffs linked to the credit and banking crises. Nationwide, about 7 percent work in the industry.
Tumult in the financial industry is rippling through other sectors of the economy, including the commercial real estate sector in downtown San Francisco, where all the financial giants involved in takeovers or mergers maintain operations, according to tenant broker Frank Fudem.
"It's a multiplier effect," Fudem said. "We're seeing contraction in many other sectors that are not financial in nature."
More than 700,000 square feet of leased office space had been abandoned by tenants and left vacant in 2008, before the financial markets descended into turmoil, according to Fudem. The impact of the turmoil on commercial occupancy rates is expected to hit in the coming months, he said.
"We are not at the bottom," Fudem said.
Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, said The City cannot afford to take its long-running status as an economic powerhouse for granted.
"Most people assume we'll come out of this - and we will - but I think we need to stay focused on the long-term competitiveness of the region," Metcalf said. "We need to do some pruning on the tangle of regulations that has grown up in the last decade that raise the cost of doing business here."
Underground power plant might be built in SoMa original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Nov. 17, 2008
As controversy rages about if a power plant should be built or rebuilt in southeast San Francisco, city officials have quietly been developing plans for a separate underground plant to service planned high-rise buildings in SoMa.
Massive amounts of power will be needed for the planned 1,000-foot Transbay office tower and rebuilt Transbay Transit Center at Mission and First streets, and for the thousands of new homes and millions of square feet of office space expected to be built in the coming decades in the South of Market neighborhood.
The privately owned and operated plant would be designed so it could eventually run on hydrogen fuel cells instead of fossil fuels, Environment Department building official Mark Palmer said. Hydrogen fuel cells are an emerging type of technology that can be recharged using renewable or non-renewable power.
Waste heat from the plant would be trapped and used to warm water for a combined heating district, dramatically improving the plant's efficiency and eliminating the need for individual heating and cooling systems, which are often built on rooftops, according to Palmer.
"Instead of having a boiler and an air-conditioning plant in every building in a certain district, you could build a central facility that would provide heating and cooling for all the buildings," Palmer said.
Combined heating districts, which are common throughout the world, can double a power plant's efficiency by reducing the amount of heat that is wasted, according to Palmer. The districts also maximize useable space in new buildings.
About 170 buildings in San Francisco are already heated and cooled using a similar network of steam created by non-electricity producing boilers at Jessie Street between 5th and 6th streets and near the corner of Post and Hyde streets, according to NRG Energy, which owns the system. The steam can be seen wafting up from city streets.
Eric Brooks, chairman of the San Francisco Green Party's Sustainability Working Group, pointed to climate change and said The City should spend generously on a plant that runs on hydrogen cells that are recharged using renewable energy.
"Building any fossil fuel power plant - even if it's really efficient - is a bad idea," Brooks said.
A feasibility study, expected to be published within eight weeks, will determine how much power and heat will be needed by new SoMa buildings and whether it could be provided by a subterranean natural gas-burning power plant, according to San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Project Manager Mike Grisso.
Lennar Corp. seeks higher return for S.F. redevelopment project original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Oct. 28, 2008
Massive redevelopment efforts at Candlestick Point and the long-shuttered Hunters Point Naval Shipyard - including a possible new 49ers stadium - will be in peril unless profit margins increase, the developer warned Monday.
The San Francisco Redevelopment Commission approved a nonbinding, multibillion-dollar draft financing plan negotiated between government officials and developer Lennar Corp. to build homes, office and research space, shops and parks in the southeast neighborhood.
However, further negotiations are needed in the coming months to increase the projected monthly internal rate of return - a measure of profitability - from 15.8 percent to 22.5 percent, Lennar chief local negotiator and Vice President Kofi Bonner told The Examiner after the hearing. The current rate would result in a projected profit of $700 million during 15 years.
"This project, in its entirety, is not where it needs to be," Bonner said. "The capital markets would not look at this given the risks."
Projected profitability could be lifted by increasing planned taxes, amending construction schedules and tweaking other elements of the redevelopment plan, Bonner said.
In an effort to convince the 49ers to remain in San Francisco, The City is proposing to lease 17.4 acres of land at the former shipyard to the franchise for $1 a year, and Lennar is offering the franchise $100 million toward construction of a new stadium, the draft plan shows.
The proposal also shows the number of housing units that could be built on the 770 acres of waterfront land has increased from 10,000 to 10,500 since June, when 62 percent of San Francisco voters backed the plan by endorsing Measure G.
San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Executive Director Fred Blackwell said Lennar's push for bigger profits is reasonable, but it will be a challenge.
"I think it can be achieved, but I think we're going to have to really dig deeply," Blackwell said.
If the project moves forward, a 15-year building phase could begin by 2011 or '12, according to Redevelopment Agency official Stephen Maduli-Williams.
Angel Island fire controlled after 43 hours original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Oct. 15, 2008
The wildfire that ravaged more than half of Angel Island was fully contained by 4 p.m. Tuesday - 43 hours after the spectacular inferno started to take hold of San Francisco Bay's largest island.
Some firefighters were scheduled to leave the island Tuesday evening after battling the blaze, which charred 380 acres of the 740-acre state park, but most of the 275-person contingent will begin leaving Wednesday, according to Mike Giannini, Battalion Chief of the Marin County Fire Department.
"There's virtually no chance that the fire will spread, but there are still hotspots," Giannini said at 6 p.m.
The hotspots, which included smoldering stumps, burning branches and patches of cindering grass, were all located within the core of the swathe of burned earth and they were not expected to reach the charcoaled perimeter to fan new flames, according to Giannini.
A "significant number" of exotic Eucalyptus trees have been removed from the island in recent years, and their removal helped protect all 120 of the mostly-low-lying historic buildings on the island, according to Giannini.
"Eucalyptus burns extremely fast and extremely hot," Giannini said. "Had the Eucalyptus trees been in place during the course of the fire, it would have been extremely difficult to protect those structures."
Officials have yet to determine the cause of the blaze, according to Giannini.
The fire originated on the eastern side of the island, in an area between two campsites, said Roy Stearns, spokesman for the California State Parks, the agency that maintains operations on Angel Island.
Twenty-nine campers were evacuated from the island Sunday after the fire broke out about 9 p.m.
The family of one of the 11 full-time state employees that work on the island that included a young child was sheltering in Tiburon late Tuesday, according to Angel Island Park Superintendant Dave Matthews. The rest of the families and workers remained on the island despite an absence of electricity, he said.
The fire will make island life initially difficult for its human inhabitants, but it was healthy for its wildlife, according to Matthews.
"Fire is a natural part of our ecology, especially in the California environment, so having a wildfire go through does help rejuvenate the plant species," Matthews said.
The island's water supply comes from wells that were unaffected by the fire, according to Matthews.
A Pacific Gas & Electric Co. crew on Tuesday began assessing damages to the island's power supply, which is delivered from the North Bay through underwater cables, according to spokesman Joe Molica.
Molica said he didn't know how long it will take the company to replace damaged wires, poles and transformers to help repower the island.
"We have to replace equipment in some pretty rugged terrain," Molica said.
The island reaches a peak of 788 feet at Mount Livermore. It has served as a U.S. Army fort, an immigration station and a missile base.
When rainy weather arrives, it's harvest season original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Oct. 9, 2008
Rainwater-harvesting systems have long graced rooftops in far-flung, water-poor lands, but for some San Franciscans - such as Tara Hui of Visitacion Valley - the exotic practice is a modern-day reality.
Hui is a trailblazer of rainwater harvesting in San Francisco, having started a small operation when it was still outlawed by The City.
Now, the 38-year-old urban farmer has 25 barrels connected to the 1,000-square-foot roof of her home - and Hui is acting as an adviser and pinup girl for a city-run campaign to convince others to emulate her once-renegade ways.
Hui picked up the empty ingredient drums for free from food manufacturers and paid about $200 for plumbing equipment, she said.
"I felt really terrible irrigating with freshwater from the tap," Hui said. "So I just started tinkering and I looked online for some resources."
Fortunately for Hui and residents who hope to cut utility bills and prevent sewage-tainted floods in The City, water officials are lending a helping hand to the growing conservation trend.
A plumbing rule was changed in 2005 to allow San Franciscans to rearrange their gutters to funnel rainwater into tanks and drums.
The change allows residents to conserve water as well as reduce the amount of rainwater that flows into The City's sewer system.
The sewage and stormwater that gushes beneath the streets can overload the sewer system during storms.
"There's no reason why we should send all of this rainwater to our treatment plant when we could capture it and use it," said Public Utilities Commission official Sarah Minnick. Minnick is spearheading a campaign of giveaways, workshops and potential subsidies to promote urban rainwater harvesting as part of a $100,000 water-outreach program.
If every drop of rain falling on a 1,000-foot roof in the Mission district is harvested, a household could save 12,500 gallons of water and $196.41 on their water bills in a year of average rainfall, according to analysis of Public Utilities Commission figures and historical weather data from The Examiner.
Minnick suggests using harvested rainwater for cleaning and irrigation rather than for drinking. City permits and plumbing skills are needed to use rainwater in toilets.
Rainwater has long quenched households in the dry continents of Australia and Africa, and droughts and growing demand for water in the United States are beginning to help a growing industry sell more equipment here, industry members told The Examiner.
California's rainwater-harvesting industry is in its infant stages, but it's growing quickly as the statewide water crisis becomes more severe, said Tim Pope, president of the 500-member American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association.
"As water's getting more scarce, people are getting a bit more hip to it," said Tim Antonoplos, a salesman for a tank-supply company based in Southern California, where rainwater harvesting is more common than in Northern California.
The 20 or so inches of rain that fall each year in San Francisco - which is less than half that of Portland, Ore., and about 50 percent more than that of Los Angeles and Stockton - is very clean because it falls from storms that have arrived from the Pacific Ocean, National Weather Service meteorologist Dwane Dykema said.
Despite the abundance of clean rainfall, just a handful of San Francisco residents have started capturing water that runs off their rooftops since 2005.
"People don't quite know what to do with the water," Minnick said. "People call us, and we try to hook them up with various resources."
To demonstrate rainwater harvesting's simplicity, Minnick's team recently installed an array of eight rain-catching barrels at the water treatment plant in the Bayview district. They bought the barrels, which were originally used to import olives into the U.S., from a hardware store.
The Public Utilities Commission will begin raffling off 100 barrels during workshops at its Big Blue Bucket Eco-Fair at Jerrold Avenue and Phelps Street in the Bayview from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, and it's considering offering subsidies to cut the costs of harvesting systems, Minnick said.
Water from above fuels plans for new City Hall
A lavish network of ponds and fountains planned in front of City Hall will be nourished using rainwater, but it will also be topped up with tap water or groundwater during drier months.
The decorative system, which might provide water for irrigation and to flush toilets, will trap stormwater to help prevent it from flooding The City's sewers after storms, according to Public Utilities Commission water official Rosey Jencks.
The network is part of Mayor Gavin Newsom's recently announced plan to turn the Civic Center into a "sustainability district."
One of the district's goals would be an 80 percent water-use reduction at City Hall.
Newsom spokesman Joe Arellano said nonstorm-water sources of water will sometimes be used for the feature, saying drinkable water will be used only "where required."
Funding for the $2.6 million system has not been secured.
"We hope to receive future Federal Energy and Water Appropriations, SFPUC budget line items and grants," Arellano said in an e-mail.
Do-it-yourself rainwater harvesting
Tips
Redirect your downspout into containers connected by tubes
Use emptied food-grade barrels instead of new plastic containers
Food manufacturers sometimes give away empty barrels
Avoid harvesting water off tar-covered rooftops
Clean your rooftop before installing a system
Clear debris out of gutters frequently
Costs
$10 to $35: Empty 55-gallon wine or food barrel
$660: Plastic 400 gallon urban water tank (29" x 60" x 71")
$28 and up: Gutter connection with leaf and mosquito screen
$58 and up: Optional diverter to avoid initial runoff from dirty rooftop
$28: Optional water filter
$525: Optional 115-volt hose pump
Sources: Public Utilities Commission; craigslist.org; Loomis Tank Centers; Tara Hui
Coast Guard has girded defense since 9/11 original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Sept. 11, 2008
In the seven years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the San Francisco Bay has become massively more militarized, draped with a heavily armed flotilla of helicopters, ships and agents ready to protect lives and commerce from the presumed threat of tyrannical terrorists.
The U.S. Coast Guard's orange, 21-foot dinghies zipping about the Bay in bolstered numbers are equipped with 4-foot-long machine guns that can tear through steel by unleashing 10 bullets per second.
The familiar buzz of four unarmed Coast Guard helicopters that patrol the shorelines is being swapped out for the quieter drone of similar-looking but armor-laden choppers equipped with machine guns and rifles.
"Shortly after 9/11, we started ramping up," San Francisco Sector Commander Capt. Paul Gugg said. "At times, it's completely unnecessary to be armed. But there are those situations where you're dealing with people who have been acting illegally or negligently."
The Bay Area is listed by the Department of Homeland Security as one of the seven U.S. regions with the greatest risk of a terrorist attack or natural disaster because of its landmarks, urban density and economy. In August, the federal department set aside $37.2 million to protect the region from threats or unforeseen accidents.
The Coast Guard is just one of several agencies that have broadened their presence in the Bay Area. The agency's requested budget has risen from $3.9 billion before 9/11 to $9.4 billion in 2008, U.S. Government Accountability Office reports show. There now are 27 armed small Coast Guard boats stationed in the Bay Area - up from 19 before 9/11, according to agency figures.
To help operate the new vehicles and wield the additional weapons, the Coast Guard has expanded its force of officers and broadened their training.
The new measures are designed to protect the Bay Area and Port of Oakland against foreign and domestic enemies, Gugg said.
"The mounted automatic weapons are relatively new in the numbers and on the type of craft that you're seeing," Gugg said.
The 27-pound M240B weapons mounted on the agency's 25-foot response boats and 41-foot rescue boats are fully-automatic machine guns that can spray 200 to 600 rounds per minute fed through ammunition belts, product specifications show. They can hit targets 2.3 miles away.
The agency's 87-foot boats can fire 5-inch slugs through .50-caliber machine guns, according to officials.
Unlike the Army, Air Force, Navy or Marines, which are normally barred from enforcing civilian laws by the 1878 U.S. Posse Comitatus Act, the Coast Guard has broad enforcement authorities for Californians covering everything from fishing-license rules to narcotics interception and counter-terrorism missions.
A new vessel-boarding team developed by the San Francisco Coast Guard in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks led to a "significant increase in personnel," spokeswoman Lauren Kolumbic said.
By the numbers
$20 million: Price of each new MH-65C Dolphin helicopter
4: Helicopters stationed at Yerba Buena Island
180 mph: Top speed of the U.S. Coast Guard's new helicopters
$2 million: Price of each 41-foot rescue boat
$250,000: Price of each 25-foot response boat
46 mph: Top speed of the Coast Guard's 25-foot response boats
$24.4 billion: Imports through Port of Oakland last year
$11.4 billion: Exports through Port of Oakland last year
Sources: U.S. Coast Guard, Port of Oakland
Small fish, invisible fence protect city's water supply
An unlikely combination of invisible electronic fencing and 2-inch bluegill fish has been deployed to help protect San Francisco's drinking water in the wake of Sept. 11.
The drinking water is carried from Hetch Hetchy through seven counties down 185 miles to taps in San Francisco and neighboring municipalities.
Greg Suhr has traveled as far as Israel for water-defense ideas since the San Francisco Police Department deputy chief was appointed to manage homeland security for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission in 2005. He is charged with protecting the water from poisons and other malicious contaminants.
Since 2006, the agency's security staff has been "fine-tuning" an invisible fence in Yosemite designed to detect humans creeping toward valuable water supplies. The biggest challenge has been false alarms triggered by wildlife, Suhr said.
This year, the agency secured an $8 million U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant to expand a 3-year-old bio-monitoring program to place additional bluegills in drinking water. Computers monitor the fish and set off alarms when they change the way they swim or act, Suhr said.
New life for Lake Merced original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Sept. 4, 2008
Once upon a time, The City's largest body of fresh water was a haven for boaters, anglers and city dwellers seeking myriad forms of recreation - until droughts and development drained the water, drove off revelers and killed the fish. Can a new wave of activists, officials and stakeholders turn the lake into a destination again?
When considering water recreation and viewing options, most San Franciscans think of The City's beaches and the Bay. Less attention is paid to its freshwater lake.
Located in the southwestern corner of San Francisco, Lake Merced was once a boating, fishing and picnicking hot spot, but those pastimes virtually disappeared when droughts more than a decade ago dried the freshwater system - which is actually four interconnected lakes - into a muddy mess.
These days, Lake Merced is percolating with new life, but derelict remnants of its former self still suppress its potential to return to the social hub and urban sanctuary it once was.
When the lake's level fell, reaching a 60-year low around 1993, fish grew elusive and foul-tasting, the lake's ecology crumbled and a muddy odor became rank.
That led a concessionaire to abandon the charming wooden boathouse from which he ran a bar, rented boats and sold bait, tackle and fishing licenses.
Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, a native San Franciscan whose district includes Lake Merced, said he remembers its decline.
"I did see, as a kid, the water levels getting lower - I saw that all through the late '80s and '90s," the District 7 supervisor said. "Nothing is more frustrating to me as District 7 supervisor than to drive past Lake Merced and see the dilapidated boathouse."
But Elsbernd said he holds out hope that recommendations being prepared after nine years of meetings by an advisory group of environmentalists and recreational groups will help turn Lake Merced once again into a popular "recreational, educational and cultural resource."
Unveiled this spring, the Lake Merced Watershed Plan considers a number of scenarios for the 614-acre lake and park area that aim to return it to its former glory, with restored wetlands, park benches, a campground, restrooms and a nature center to complement boating, fishing and trail activities.
Working in conjunction with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission - which owns the lake as an emergency backup water source - the plans will be discussed at meetings with neighborhood associations and recreation groups this month, SFPUC project manager David Behar said.
Additional uses of the lake could include continued skeet and trap shooting, a new or restored boathouse, competitive rowing, dragon-boat races, kayaking, a nature-education center, a bait-and-tackle shop, kiosks, and picnic and play areas, according to a draft plan released in April.
Controversial components of the proposal include a call to evict the lakeside Pacific Rod and Gun Club, an 80-year tenant of the area.
There is also concern that changes at the lake could include new development opportunities - a possibility that has residents of a nearby 721-apartment complex on edge, said Lakewood Tenants Association president Mona Cereghino.
"The lake has always been very juicy for contractors," she said.
A new recreational plan for the lake is scheduled to be ready early next year, Behar said. Once the plan is finalized, however, fundraising efforts and environmental reviews will be needed to help realize the vision, he said.
Dee Dee Workman, who helped form the Lake Merced Task Force, said a new plan could see the lake transformed into a destination as popular among day-tripping locals as the waterfront, Presidio and Golden Gate Park - in stark contrast to today.
"There are an awful lot of people in San Francisco who have lived here for a number of years and couldn't find Lake Merced on a map," Workman said.
City lost its prime fishing hole
Falling water levels in Lake Merced robbed The City of what had been known as a "jewel" among U.S. urban fisheries.
As the lake's water levels fell late in the 20th century, the cold water turned warm and inhospitable for many of the aquatic inhabitants, according to Lake Merced Task Force member Dee Dee Workman.
"The lake almost died," Workman said. "The water was so bad that no one could fish. All they were catching were these yucky bottom feeders."
Until it shuttered in 2002, the lake's bait-and-tackle proprietor would annually stock the lake with trout to help drum up business, said Mondy Loriz, an official at nonprofit fishing advocacy group CalTrout.
"From the '50s through the '70s and part of the '80s, the fishing was really outstanding at Lake Merced," Loriz said. "One of the big fishing magazines claimed it was the jewel of all urban fisheries."
The California Department of Fish and Game still stocks the lake with baby trout.
Loriz said as residents and city officials go forward with plans for the lake's renaissance, he hopes fishing programs for youths are resumed.
In addition to trout, there are fish similar to largemouth bass in the lake, which could be supported as a new fishery with a few ecological measures, Loriz said.
"They would be able to reproduce in the lake, and they don't compete with trout," Loriz said.
New, sustainable water sources on tap
In the late 1980s and early '90s, water levels at Lake Merced fell 10 feet from the already low levels, caused by a variety of factors, including droughts and nearby pavement-happy developments that prevented rainwater from recharging underground aquifers, according to members of the Lake Merced Task Force.
At the same time, pumping was increased from the same aquifers to keep parks and golf courses lush.
After droughts sent water levels to a 60-year low around 1993, refilling efforts using water from The City's Hetch Hetchy dam have since helped lift them by nine feet.
Pumping from underground aquifers - along with a new system of wetlands along John Muir Drive to clean rainwater runoff and channel it into the lake - is being considered by The City to help push water levels up while protecting Hetch Hetchy reserves.
A day at the lake
The City is looking to add to the activities already available at Lake Merced.
Among proposed changes
Recreational activities at Lake Merced
Source: Lake Merced Watershed Plan
Lake Merced by the numbers
614: Acres of land and water
70: Species of birds observed nesting
4: Interconnecting lakes
2.1: Miles of trails
45,000: Approximate number of fingerling rainbow trout stocked in 2007
9.25 pounds: Weight of a record-breaking trout caught in 1952
Sources: San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, California Department of Fish and Game, San Francisco Public Library, CalTrout
The magic of wind power original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, July 31, 2008
Scores of windmills, which for millennia have provided a familiar backdrop to agrarian life, are poised to blow into San Francisco's urban core on the winds of technological and bureaucratic change.
Wind power is considered a renewable energy source, like solar. A wind turbine can look like a giant fan - simply put, the wind turns the blades, spinning a shaft connected to a generator to make electricity. Nationwide, the number of small, electricity-producing wind turbines grew from several thousand earlier this decade to more than 35,000 in 2007, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
In San Francisco, four wind-energy companies have set up shop; in April, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced the formation of a task force dedicated to looking at The City's potential to pursue and encourage wind power. To date, six turbines have been installed in San Francisco, three on private homes.
Earlier this month, Newsom eliminated one of The City's biggest barriers to residential wind energy by sending out directives asking planning and building-inspection departments to "expedite permitting and minimize costs" needed to install residential, commercial and municipal wind turbines in The City.
Prospective wind harvesters have been hamstrung by the lack of a standard turbine-permit application process, said San Francisco builder Robin Wilson, a task force member who last year founded Whirligig Inc., which sells and installs turbines.
Until now, San Francisco has been able to take only small steps on the path to wind power, those paved by city supervisors who have supported individual wind projects in their districts. Supervisor Tom Ammiano, a task-force member, tweaked height rules to help Todd Pelman, founder of the San Francisco start-up Blue Green Pacific, install a turbine on his Bernal Heights home. Board colleague Bevan Dufty also helped secure a permit for a residential turbine on a home in the Castro.
In addition to encouraging wind-power technology for residents and businesses, Newsom also ordered city departments to incorporate wind turbines into city facilities "whenever and wherever possible" in his July 17 directives.
There are currently no wind turbines operating on municipal buildings or city-owned land, however, and a study revealed the challenges San Francisco faces if it wants to create a large-scale wind-energy project.
Commissioned by The City in 2004, the study discovered "poor" economic feasibility for wind-energy projects at Pier 39, the San Francisco Zoo and Hunters Point - all waterfront locations. Treasure Island and the airport were found to harbor wind-energy potential, while Twin Peaks was the most promising site studied.
There is massive variation in the amount of wind energy that can be captured in San Francisco, which is dominated by microclimates and wind-tunneling buildings and streets.
"If you're really interested in doing wind at your site," suggested The City's Environment Department Renewable Energy Program Manager Johanna Partin, "you should really put up a wind data-collection device for six months."
The City is considering subsidizing the prices of so-called wind anemometers, which retail for $150, or renting them out to residents to help defray the costs of the measurement devices, Partin said.
On a larger scale, Partin said the new urban wind-power task force will also investigate The City's options to build an offshore wind farm, similar to one recently approved in Massachusetts. In that project, 130 planned open-water turbines will produce 420 megawatts of electricity - more power than is produced by The City's only remaining power plant at Potrero Hill.
Home turbines may avert bird death problem
Robin Wilson, who founded San Francisco based Whirligig Inc. to sell and install turbines, said she was pleased when Mayor Gavin Newsom took a tangible step to encourage the development of wind power in San Francisco by asking city departments to expedite permitting for turbines.
"I had about 30 names of people who definitely wanted them," she said. "I've contacted all of them and everybody's excited."
The turbines sold by Wilson's company sell for between $17,000 and $20,000, but a state rebate will slash the price by one-fourth or more, she said.
In windy conditions, one of the company's 33- to 60-foot high windmills, which resemble scaled-down versions of the steel structures cemented into the Altamont Pass, could power a modest home, product specifications suggest.
The early-generation Altamont Pass turbines have earned ire and lawsuits from bird-lovers for their raptor-killing side effects, but Wilson said she hasn't found any dead birds in the 11 months that she has used her company's product at her Mission home. The Altamont Pass is in a migration route and the fast-spinning blades are invisible to birds, while Wilson said her products are easier to see.
Newfangled gadgets prove effective so far
Less powerful but more compact turbines are being engineered in the Bayview workshop of start-up company Blue Green Pacific, which has installed elegant 6-foot-high, horizontally-rotating prototypes on top of a windswept garage in the Castro, primarily for testing purposes.
Founder Todd Pelman said he has a list of "hundreds" of Bay Area residents queuing for the virtually soundless toys. The products will have an "emotional" appeal, like a Prius, he said.
"One of these isn't really going to make a difference - but if there's many, then there's an aggregate effect," the former engineer said.
Pelman said he hopes to start selling prototypes within a year. The company, which is in "a race" to raise money and secure a position in the emerging market, aims to mass-market the appliances for under $5,000, he said.
Winds of change fail to blow for SFPUC building
One of Mayor Gavin Newsom's July 17 directives on wind power ordered city departments to incorporate wind turbines into city facilities "whenever and wherever possible."
Less than a week later, however, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission announced it was walking away from plans to build an ultra-green building near City Hall with windmills on the roof and walls due to rising costs and sobering environmental findings.
SFPUC staff discovered the windmills would generate far less power than originally imagined, according to John Doyle, an SFPUC official who oversees energy-generation projects.
"Even though people think it's windy in San Francisco, it's not that windy," Doyle said. "There might be places like Twin Peaks or Visitacion Valley or some other places where you might get some strong winds."
Ahead of the game
There are currently six wind-energy turbines in San Francisco.
Source: San Francisco Environment Department
By the numbers
34 Members of a city-sponsored urban wind-power task force, announced in April
6 Wind turbines in The City
0 City-owned wind turbines
4 San Francisco firms developing or selling wind turbines
9 Bay Area firms developing or selling wind turbines
8.2 mph Average wind speed 33 feet above Pier 39
12.7 mph Average wind speed 33 feet above Twin Peaks
Sources: San Francisco Environment Department, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association
New College collapse has theater reeling original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, June 19, 2008
An alternative-film theater was left crippled with debts and a radical bookstore lost a slab of its business in the Mission neighborhood following New College of San Francisco's recent collapse.
The 36-year-old progressive university was shuttered after the Western Association of Schools and Colleges yanked its accreditation in February after a yearlong investigation into claims of financial and operational mismanagement. Some employees continue to fight to reopen the school.
The Roxie Theater, which was donated to New College in 2006, will celebrate 100 years of film screenings next year if new owners can turn around its financial woes.
"The bills were all being forwarded to New College, so we didn't even know they were unpaid until the power went out or until the water was off," said operations manager Rachel Hart, one of the 20 part-time workers paid in April for the first time in nearly six months. "We just did whatever we could to keep operating."
More than 30 neighborhood theaters have closed in the past 30 years and roughly one dozen remain, according to San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation President Alfonso Felder. He blamed rising real estate prices and downtown multiplex theaters for the trend.
New College graduate Alan Holt, a 2007 writing and literature major with no theater industry experience, took over management of the Roxie in April with an infusion of cash from himself and his father.
Holt said he is in negotiations to purchase the theater, which he hopes to run as a nonprofit so it can raise tax-free funds from donations and membership dues.
The theater under Holt will continue to rent out its space for special events and increase the number of films that it distributes to help lift profits and retain greater revenue shares of the films that it screens, he said.
"We just want to continue to show films that you won't see anywhere else," Holt said. "You want something that's commercially viable, but you also want to be able to pick up some films that aren't."
The Modern Times Bookstore on nearby Valencia Street also was left struggling in the wake of New College's collapse, according to Ruth Mahane, a member of the collective that runs the leftist shop.
"They used us for their course books and things - so that's a big chunk out of our money," she said.
City's strategy fueling biotech boom original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, June 14, 2008
Companies that reinvent and retool the building blocks of life - including proteins, DNA and human tissue - are driving a bricks-and-mortar construction boom in Mission Bay.
"When we started four years ago, we had one biotech company," Mayor Gavin Newsom proudly announced at a press conference earlier this month about The City's fiscal situation. "Now there are 44."
The convergence of 12 venture capitalists in San Francisco with biotech portfolios, including five in Mission Bay, has helped the sector grow, according to Jennifer Matz, deputy director in the Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development.
The industry's growth, however, has been driven largely by UC San Francixco's biomedical research facility in Mission Bay and the more than 300 acres of surrounding land that was specially zoned to cater to the needs of life-sciences companies, according to Matz.
"Mission Bay is developing out as the hub of the life-sciences community in San Francisco," Matz said. "It's drawing talent and researchers and dollars from the surrounding Bay Area."
More than 630,000 square feet of private office and research space has been built for biotech companies in Mission Bay since the redevelopment began in 2000, according to San Francisco Redevelopment Agency project manager Kelley Kahn. Another 1 million square feet is under construction and an extra 1.6 million square feet is in the pipeline, Kahn said.
In 2005, The City began offering certain biotech companies an exemption from its 1.5 percent payroll tax. Seven companies employing 215 people applied for the exemption last year - up from six companies and 162 employees the year before, according to data from the San Francisco Office of the Treasurer and Tax Collector. They earned average salaries of $99,000.
Global trends in the industry have led to the outsourcing of specialized functions such as research and sales, said Matt Gardner, president of Bay Bio, a Northern California industry group.
"A company with a research headquarters can be a white-collar operation, and that's opened up lots of opportunities for San Francisco to expand its biotech base rapidly," he said.
Protein- and antibody-research company FivePrime moved from South San Francisco to Mission Bay in 2005, according to its CEO, Gail Maderis. The company aims to start testing its products on patients later this year, she said.
Maderis said the company employs about 90 people from around the Bay Area, and that The City's decision to waive the payroll tax for certain biotech companies helps it compete with surrounding counties, which don't charge such a tax.
By the numbers
How the biotechnology industry is building a home in San Francisco:
3: Biotech companies in The City in 2004
44: Biotech companies in The City today
3: Private biotech buildings opened in Mission Bay, 2005-08
4: Private biotech buildings planned to open in Mission Bay, 2008-09
6: Private biotech buildings planned to open in Mission Bay after 2009
7: Biotech companies receiving payroll tax exemptions in 2007
$319,123: Payroll tax waived for biotech companies in 2007
Sources: Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development; S.F. Redevelopment Agency; S.F. Office of the Treasurer and Tax Collector
Major players
Some of the biotech businesses headquartered in San Francisco:
Established in The City
Moved to The City
Source: Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development
Bay to Breakers cleanup an obstacle this year original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, May 19, 2008
Dancing in the streets to electronic beats at the 97th annual ING Bay to Breakers was quelled Sunday afternoon when police were called in to clear a path for street sweepers and trash collectors.
San Francisco resident Jesse Hooper was one of the thousands of disappointed people who jeered as a line of 10 motorcycle-riding police officers shouted orders and sounded sirens over the din of bass-heavy boom-boxes to help clear Fell Street.
"It's a Sunday afternoon and the stereos are playing and everyone's having a good time," Hooper said. "Is it really a good time to clean the streets?"
The race was won by a pair of speedy Kenyan athletes, but more than 35 tons of mess that trailed the event was left behind, mostly by ambulatory revelers more interested in drinking than in sprinting.
Nearly 70 city workers used their hands, brooms, bags and a flotilla of heavy-duty trucks to scour the trail of smashed liquor and beer bottles, empty wine boxes, discarded costumes, fast-food containers, plastic bags and disposable cups that littered the course from The Embarcadero to Ocean Beach.
As the workers marched west from Van Ness Avenue they ran into a wall of boisterous partiers - many in disintegrating costumes and some wearing little more than the skin they were born in.
Department of Public Works deputy director Mohammad Nuru, who coordinated the massive clean-up operation, said he called in police around 1 p.m. so his workers could do their jobs.
"Last year we didn't need police," Nuru said. "There were a lot more people this time. This year the most difficult part of the race was Fell Street - there were too many house-parties; too many drunk people."
Many entrepreneurial passers-by were filling shopping trolleys with empty bottles and cans as The City's cleanup crews drew near, but much of the recyclable material that the passers-by missed was crushed along with unrecyclable trash in dump trucks.
Golden Gate Disposal and Recycling Co. set up recycling points along the route, according to general manager Maurice Quillen. He said event organizers were responsible for making sure waste was sorted properly, and he said recyclable material mixed with trash will end up in landfill.
Bay to Breakers cleanup efforts
Waste collected: 35.45 tons
Workers: 69
Mechanical sweepers: 8
Water and steam trucks: 6
Dump trucks: 2
Source: San Francisco Department of Public Works
Blighted street seeing the light original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, April 25, 2008
A French bakery and restaurant set to replace a pawn shop and liquor store near Market and Sixth streets will become the latest in a barrage of boutique businesses to move into the world-wearied neighborhood when it fires up its ovens this summer.
The City's Redevelopment Agency has seen 22 new businesses move onto Sixth Street between Harrison and Market streets since 2003, slashing the strip's retail vacancy rate from 43 percent to 15 percent and helping to knock liquor stores and other "adult businesses" out of the area, according to project manager Mike Grisso.
The next new business slated to open along the corridor is a French-themed bakery, cafe and bistro which has recruited its pastry chef from Paris, according to business owner Steve Barton.
Meanwhile, change also is sweeping through nearby streets.
The Warfield Theater will likely see improvements undertaken later this year, according to property owner David Addington.
Addington also owns a nearby building that houses The City's largest pornography store. "There's a chance that [Secrets Adult Super Store is] not long for this world," he said.
An increased police presence in the past nine months has helped chase off drug dealers and other "antisocial activities" that dissuade new businesses from leasing in the area, according to Addington.
"They're not unpleasant people - they're kind of nice," Addington said. "But if you're from out of town and unaccustomed to seeing these sorts of things, the experience can be very unsettling."
Southwest along Market Street, modern-looking residential towers with 1,900 units are expected to open opposite the Orpheum Theater by 2010, according to developer James Sangiacomo.
In the opposite direction along Market Street, a five-story glass-fronted mall is scheduled to open between Fifth and Sixth streets by 2011, according to project manager Sean Thompson.
Nearby, the elegant but little-used sandstone-walled courtyard in the heart of the former U.S. Mint is expected to be roofed over and turned into a restaurant by 2012, according to facilities manager Art Ferretti. Mint Plaza opened next door in November.
The transformation is positive, according to Gabriel Metcalf, head of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. He described Market Street as San Francisco's "most important street," in part because of the massive amounts of transit and transport that run through and beneath it.
"Private investment is starting," Metcalf said. "It's time to match that with some public investment."
Wave of development could sweep through four eastern neighborhoods original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, April 17, 2008
A building boom in San Francisco's east side could start within a year, with white-collar jobs and thousands of new homes expected to replace dwindling industrial jobs in a sweeping 2,200-acre rezoning proposal ready to be debated by city leaders after nine years of planning efforts.
The 1,373-page draft Eastern Neighborhood plan - which will guide the future development of areas including the Central Waterfront, Potrero Hill, the Mission and some part of the South of Market neighborhood - goes before The City's Planning Commission today.
The plan, if eventually adopted by the Board of Supervisors, is expected to reduce the amount of light industry in those areas, by allowing increased housing density and building heights, and changing building rules.
If the plan is approved, higher-density homes could be built in the neighborhoods to house more than 20,000 new residents by 2025 - a 30 percent population rise, according to findings in a draft environmental impact report.
John Rahaim, The City's planning director, said the plan aims to slow the ongoing loss of light industry and other related businesses that historically dominated San Francisco's east.
The draft plan aims to encourage construction of new homes and "employment space" that's better suited to emerging "knowledge-based" industries, Rahaim said, such as those in the biotechnology, environmental and information technology fields.
The total number of jobs in the neighborhoods is expected to remain relatively unchanged if the rezoning goes ahead, but the number of industrial jobs could fall by as much as one-third to 23,000, according to the environmental impact report.
The proposal also includes plans for at least four new parks, would develop transit-, bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, and preserve certain view corridors.
At least 88 development projects are on hold pending the plan's finalization, according to Rahaim, who said he hopes to have the approval process completed by the fall.
Construction of those projects could begin early next year and the housing and office markets will determine whether a building-boom occurs at that point, he said.
The plan's path to approval could be a bumpy one.
Some city legislators have expressed concerns about keeping unbridled development in check and dozens of residents and neighborhood groups attended planning commission meetings in December and January to voice opposition.
Critics of the plan say they fear neighborhood identities will be lost, along with diversity and small businesses.
Developers and builders also say they are worried by the proposal, which requires around one-third of the new units to be sold at below-market rates to very low- to middle-income earners.
Residential Builders Association President Sean Keighran said more incentives, such as height allowances and flexibility should be offered to builders in exchange for the construction of more inclusionary housing.
Benefits of plankton disrupted by acid? original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 21, 2008
Oceans have grown more acidic as rising levels of carbon dioxide have filled the Earth's air, prompting a trio of San Francisco State University researchers to investigate whether marine plankton will continue to produce much of the globe's oxygen as its wet world grows more hostile.
Massive blooms of microscopic phytoplankton are sometimes visible from space. Unlike other types of tiny, fast-growing plankton, phytoplankton grow using energy from the sun.
Phytoplankton feed ocean ecosystems, fighting global warming by turning carbon dioxide into protective shells that are eaten by other creatures or sink to the sea floor.
"They're bringing the carbon dioxide down into the deeper water," San Francisco State University biology professor Ed Carpenter said, "so they're helping to slow global warming."
Like plants, phytoplankton release oxygen into the air, and they produce half of the world's breathable oxygen, Carpenter said.
But the world's air is becoming so saturated with carbon dioxide that oceans have grown increasingly acidic since the Industrial Revolution, Carpenter said. Ocean acidity could rise by the end of the century because of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, said Carpenter, who added that increasingly acidic water can burn through carbon shells that protect marine creatures.
To see whether plankton can survive and thrive in increasingly acidic water, Carpenter and two other researchers secured $1.2 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation to conduct long- and short-term experiments in the coming years.
One set of the short-term experiments will compare plankton growth in conditions that simulate today's ocean conditions with conditions that simulate those expected by 2100, said SF State biology professor Jonathon Stillman, who is working with Carpenter on the project at a laboratory in Tiburon.
Long-term experiments, on the other hand, will monitor clouds of rapidly multiplying phytoplankton as it evolves in acidifying water over 700 generations, according to Stillman. That will test whether plankton evolve defenses against the changing ocean conditions expected in the coming 93 years.
"If there's going to be an adaptive response," Stillman said, "we should see it by the end of two years."
The research team began preparing for the experiments last summer, according to Stillman.
Pacific chorus frog on the mend in S.F. original / top
By John Upton
San Francisco Examiner, Oct. 15, 2007
Urban wildlife sanctuaries, including an overgrown Capp Street backyard, are helping bring a tiny frog's once-familiar bellow back to San Francisco.
"At one time, the chorus frog was the sound of the Bay Area," said Jim McKissock, who has seeded The City in recent years with the young of the only remaining local population. "Now they're virtually all gone."
McKissock said local vernal habitats of the Pacific chorus frogs - which are also known as Pacific tree frogs - have been almost entirely paved over for new developments in San Francisco, and that the frogs have been nearly "weed-whacked out of existence" in overmanaged parks and lawns.
Frogs from a healthy, successful Brisbane population shouldn't be brought to San Francisco, according to McCkissock, who wants to protect local strains of the species. "If we lose these here, we'll never be able to bring them back," he said.
McKissock, who founded the local conservation nonprofit Earthcare, said he chose to use some of the precious few local tadpoles to establish a population in a Mission back yard maintained by Ned McAllister.
"It's lush and overgrown," McKissock said. "That also encourages a lot of insects - the frogs eat the insects, and the insects need a place to live, too."
McAllister estimated that 40 to 45 frogs have grown up from the 100 tadpoles introduced in May to his backyard pond. They've ventured from the pond to distant corners of the yard, where they crawl on cactus, vines and flowering plants.
Although the frogs and tadpoles are still too rare to be given to anyone who wants them, McAllister said he hasn't needed to stock his yard with wildlife for it to quickly fill with amphibians, including salamanders, and a smorgasbord of other types of little-noticed wildlife.
"It's just about letting it go," McAllister said, "and getting past the concepts of creating a highly manicured, nice garden."
The professional reptile breeder said that to create an urban wildlife refuge, dead plants should not be raked up, but should instead be left to cover and leach their nutrients back into the soil. He also said pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals are "absolutely deadly to any kind of amphibian" and should not be used.
The frogs need abundant sunshine, water and plenty of cover, said McAllister, who has hung mirrors from a fence to reflect sunlight back into the yard. He is also building a series of small, vegetated, mosquito-proof ponds throughout the yard, which he hopes to vegetate with native grasses. One lies under a hammock.
"You basically want to try to invite the wildlife into your yard," he said. "Things will land in your yard if you just leave it, like mosses, and who knows what else."
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On this page
← Wave-power project faces delays, costs, May 30, 2009
← Port gets funds to treat fish waste, April 28, 2009
← Plans for Hunters Point Naval Shipyard revealed, April 7, 2009
← Renters rejoice: Prices falling citywide, March 30, 2009
← High-density housing planned in history-rich Dogpatch neighborhood, March 15, 2009
← Bars, pubs going strong in down economy, March 9, 2009
← Revamped Metreon slated to be restaurant-centric, March 4, 2009
← Terminal project ousts tenants, Feb. 13, 2009
← Coast Guard adds machine guns to helicopters, Feb. 3, 2009
← Water troubles trickle down, Jan. 22, 2009
← Treasure Island to be protected from rising seas, Jan. 21, 2009
← Bay Area looks to draw water straight from the Bay, Jan. 15, 2009
← Police test ShotSpotter in the Mission, Dec. 19, 2008
← Empty offices build up in city, Dec. 18, 2008
← Company seeks community support for new utility boxes, Dec. 16, 2008
← Rents decline for first time since 2004, Dec. 10, 2008
← Cleaning up: City hopes to cash in on clean-tech, Dec. 4, 2008
← Transbay Terminal targets stimulus cash, Nov. 27, 2008
← Global downturn hits Bay Area businesses, Nov. 20, 2008
← Underground power plant might be built in SoMa, Nov. 17, 2008
← Lennar Corp. seeks higher return for S.F. redevelopment project, Oct. 28, 2008
← Angel Island fire controlled after 43 hours, Oct. 15, 2008
← When rainy weather arrives, it's harvest season, Oct. 9, 2008
← Coast Guard has girded defense since 9/11, Sept. 11, 2008
← New life for Lake Merced, Sept. 4, 2008
← The magic of wind power, July 31, 2008
← New College collapse has theater reeling, June 19, 2008
← City's strategy fueling biotech boom, June 14, 2008
← Bay to Breakers cleanup an obstacle this year, May 19, 2008
← Blighted street seeing the light, April 25, 2008
← Wave of development could sweep through four eastern neighborhoods, April 17, 2008
← Benefits of plankton disrupted by acid?, Jan. 21, 2008
← Pacific chorus frog on the mend in S.F., Oct. 15, 2007
