A Step Forward

For two years now analysts have said Muni is in a funding and maintenance "death spiral." These warnings have been ignored by the Mayor's Office. After the Wednesday and Thursday meltdown, Newsom proposed to study the issue "top down."

In politics, it's possible to get away with that kind of hogwash for a while. And the mayor may remain lucky during the next six months. Another Muni meltdown may not occur. Alarming catastrophes may very well not arise in the areas of the economy, the city's crumbling ports, its money-pit water delivery and sewage systems, its worst-in-America police performance, its substandard schools, bankrupt parks system, still-overwhelming housing shortage, and charnel-house city-funded homeless shelters. The city's massive unfunded pension obligations may also remain an open secret. There probably won't be an earthquake. So it probably won't make a difference that Newsom put a patronage hack in charge of disaster preparedness. And bastion-of-incompetence-and-corruption bureaucracies such as the S.F. Airport and the Housing Authority may refrain from producing one of their periodic scandals.

If no viable candidate steps forward to oppose him, the mayor's failure in all areas of city policy might continue bubbling below the public's consciousness.

It's during campaign season, after all, that charges and counter-charges get raised. It's when newspapers send their reporters to political debates. And sometimes, news organizations actually evaluate the policy records of politicians at around election time.

Such a process might not be friendly to Newsom.

It would be kinder to Gonzalez or Agnos.

During his time as a member of the Board of Supervisors, Gonzalez was a doer. While he was president of the Board of Supervisors, he fought during city budget negotiations to make government more efficient. He attempted to root corruption out of the Housing Authority, improved protections for city whistleblowers, and broadened city oversight of campaign spending. Now that Gonzalez has spent three years representing a client list that's included small businesses, he's developed a sensibility friendly to their interests, too.

Left-wing politicians should focus their efforts on reducing government waste, rather than increasing taxes, he said during our two-hour lunch last week.

Art Agnos, meanwhile, is the former San Francisco assemblyman who became the first statewide politician in the U.S. during the 1980s to confront the new AIDS epidemic. As mayor, after the Embarcadero Freeway was compromised during the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989, Agnos endured rebellion from his Chinatown political constituents as he led the effort to get the blight-inducing eyesore torn down.

Both of these men need to hurry up with their soul searching, and give San Francisco a real race for mayor.