Both sides feel that Brown owes them. Downtown property owners and their tenants contributed $260,000 to Brown's campaign, and the TWU made up a large number of his precinct walkers, and also contributed a respectable $10,600.
Little wonder then that the mayor is less than eager to take on the TWU over wasteful contract provisions that cost the city between $5 million and $10 million a year. Even less wonder that he is loathe to ask downtown corporations and property owners to pay more taxes to solve the system's perpetual budget shortfall.
Brown has had ample opportunity to win concessions from the TWU, since he is in the midst of negotiating their new contract. And he has also given downtown a pass on a transit assessment tax, the long-proposed leveling tool to force corporate San Francisco to pay its fair share for the inordinate amount of Muni services it benefits from.
Maybe Brown has that battle planned for year two. Maybe he is merely trying to avoid the Clinton disease of biting off too much in the first year. But the dodgy ringmaster had better beware of mass transit commuters stockpiling overripe tomatoes for his next appearance. They're getting ticked off that he's breaking open the piggy bank for unions while telling Muni riders to take a hike.
Union Deal-Busting
Polls conducted for the Committee on JOBS show the union proposal going down to defeat in November. Besides the loss of prestige and face, Brown may also be setting up two of his board appointees, Leslie Katz and Michael Yaki, for a rougher election cycle than necessary. If the COJ mounts an anti-labor campaign, Yaki and Katz will be forced to side with Brown -- unless they have a sudden spurt of independence -- and make themselves easy targets for voters fed up with the deal. If former Supervisor Annemarie Conroy jumps into the race -- she's been talking about it long enough -- the Republican also-ran from 1994 could be expected to make the agreement's price tag a big issue, causing an even rockier campaign trail for Yaki and Katz. The downside for Brown: If either or both lose, he sacrifices clout, both real and perceived, on the board.
Rookies Run Amok
If Mayor Brown keeps sending out inexperienced and arrogant staff to deal with key constituencies, like dispatching Olshin to cope with homeless advocates, he could run into the same problem that helped torpedo Art Agnos. Like Brown, Agnos had gatekeepers on his staff -- in his case for the gay community and in minority communities -- who pissed off so many people that those constituencies fled to other candidates come re-election time. Brown had better remember what happened to the last liberal mayor of S.F. who took a liberal power bloc for granted.
