Mecklin

Hey, It's Only the FBI
Because San Francisco's daily newspapers so seldom employ significant resources to investigate anything that might produce any story that might offend anyone of any conceivable influence anywhere in the Bay Area (or Northern California, really), it's worth noting when real journalism does show up.

If you missed the Examiner's June 27 package on Charlie Walker, the so-called Mayor of Hunters Point, you ought to trot down to the library (or search the Ex archives online) and settle down to a good, unsettling, realistic read. The main story in the package, headlined "FBI scrutinizes mayor's contractor pal," reports that federal agents have been questioning the locals about how Walker has managed to land large trucking subcontracts at San Francisco International Airport since Mayor Willie Brown took office.

But this is much more than a story about a governmental investigation. Based on what appears to have been exhaustive research, Examiner reporters Chuck Finnie and Lance Williams describe a series of city-related deals from which Walker, a friend and former law client of Brown, apparently has profited handsomely. Exhibit A: Walker reportedly was convicted in 1984 of grand theft, attempted extortion, perjury, and tax evasion for bilking the city's minority-contracting programs -- and now, according to the Examiner report, his trucking firm has been certified to participate in the same programs he once (as the Examiner so politely terms it) abused.

Among the many interestingly unsavory deals mentioned in the Examiner report is one involving the Lennar Corp., which won the rights to develop the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard earlier this year. Before the Redevelopment Commission awarded those potentially (amazingly) lucrative rights, Lennar just happened to hire one of Walker's firms as a "jobs broker." The commission voted to give Lennar the rights, even though a consultant had recommended another firm get the deal. And then-Redevelopment Commission President Lynette Sweet, treasurer of a nonprofit connected to Walker, was one of the commissioners voting to give the contract to Lennar. (The vote was 4-3, so Sweet's "aye" seems really to have been on the ball.)

My motives for praising the Examiner are not entirely unmixed. Energetic readers might combine its findings about the Hunters Point deal with a few facts contained in a piece the Weekly published on May 12, and teach themselves something about how this city really works.

The Weekly story (headlined "W.L. Brown: A Public/Private Partnership" and co-authored by staff writer Peter Byrne and me) focuses on a 1,000-acre golf course development north of Sacramento known as Whitney Oaks. The majority owner of Whitney Oaks is the state public employees retirement system. But a partnership in which Willie Brown has long held a stake is also an owner. And one of the firms paying millions of dollars to the owners of Whitney Oaks (including Willie Brown and associates) for the right to build out a section of Whitney Oaks is -- drum roll please -- Renaissance Homes, a subsidiary of the Lennar Corp.

Taken together, these two stories raise several questions with heavily documented specificity: Must one hire "friends" of Willie Brown to qualify for major city contracts? Hire Willie's friends and do business with his associates (and perhaps Willie himself)? Or could the exceedingly strong appearance that obtaining city contracts requires relations with mayoral friends and/or associates be merely that, an (amazingly) unfortunate appearance?

The questions are out there. The Examiner has established beyond any reasonable doubt that the FBI is investigating. And here it is weeks later, and not a word in the Chronicle about anything so frivolous and declasse as a serious federal investigation of City Hall.

Another important story that's flown, for the most part, below the radar of most local media involves the city's newsrack law, through which Willie Brown is attempting to gain control over the small amount of journalistic enterprise that does occur in San Francisco. Right now, though, the piece of the newsrack saga that's most interesting involves not Willie Brown, but his thoughtless factotum, Supervisor Barbara Kaufman.

Within her vast trove of shallow thinking and arrogance, Ms. Kaufman has one real political talent: use of the wedge issue. Her unerring instinct for the cause that will energize her upper-crust-busybody supporters, while outraging those she perceives as beneath concern, has settled most recently on an attempt to resuscitate the newsrack law. This law, passed in January, would let the city replace all individual newspaper racks in S.F. with centralized newsracks. The city would then control what papers were allowed to distribute themselves from these multibox racks.

As I've pointed out before, there are all sorts of constitutional problems with this law. The most obvious: If the city government has control over newsracks, the mayor could use space in the racks to reward newspapers he likes, and lack of space to punish those that have the temerity to point out such things as ... well, as the similarities between Richard Nixon and a sitting city supervisor allied with a struggling mayor running for re-election.

Last month, ruling in a lawsuit filed by SF Weekly and joined by every major newspaper distributing in San Francisco, U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong forbade the city from enforcing the newsrack ordinance. The judge ruled narrowly, saying that the law did not provide newspapers that want to appeal exclusion from city-controlled racks even a semblance of due process. She did not address the many other potential constitutional defects in the ordinance, because the entire centralized newsrack scheme had not been put into effect.