Louise Renne is right. The city's ethics enforcement system is set up so that she is inoculated; she is not legally required to piss off a powerful component of her continued political survival. She could enforce lobbyist reporting laws against city unions. But under our screwy system, she doesn't have to if she doesn't want.
And boy, boy, boy, she doesn't want.
The ugly job of trying to bring unions into the sunshine all other lobbyists must squint in therefore falls to Ginny Vida, executive director of the Ethics Commission. She likes her job, and she has a keen understanding of the meaning and importance of public interest laws.
And she has absolutely no power at all. She was never meant to have any. On purpose.
She has three staff members to do the job of 20. On purpose. The mayor and the supervisors keep her underfunded as a matter of explicit policy. And Renne won't put any of her investigators on the job.
Vida can't get any respect from the unions. This summer she sent out a letter to labor officials informing them that they had to file lobbyist reports.
They ignored her.
She amended the lobbyist manual her office puts out to mention, very clearly, that unions had to file reports.
They ignored her.
Then she went to her commission and asked them to amend the lobbying registration ordinance, which already requires union disclosure, to specifically, explicitly say so.
On Oct. 13 the Ethics Commission -- a commission appointed by the city attorney, the Board of Supervisors, and the mayor, friends of sunshine all (can you hear the sarcasm drip?) -- listened to Vida's articulate arguments in favor of making unions follow the same lobbying regulations that every other special interest must obey.
The commissioners mumbled something about having to look at things more closely, and about needing to hear more from labor. Then they indefinitely tabled the item. Which means that short of a biblical-style miracle, the matter is dead as a doornail.
This is the greatest expression of labor's unchecked power in San Francisco:
It's not that the unions can openly break the law, and law enforcement authorities are afraid even to investigate.
It's not that the enforcement system is purposefully set up to give the ethics cops excuses not to act against labor.
No, in San Francisco, the greatest truths are nearly always found lingering in the kingdom of the absurd.
The true measure of labor's power here is that it can stop a public body from amending a law to say ... what it already says.
That's power.
It's also evidence of a fatally flawed system of ethics enforcement.
George Cothran (gcothran@sfweekly.com) can be reached at SF Weekly, 185 Berry, Suite 3800, San Francisco,
