Astonishingly, something along these lines actually occurred last week when the San Francisco Chronicle's Cecilia Vega wrote a front-page article about a tall, slim, tanned, and newly rich bureaucrat named Wade Crowfoot.
"Mayor Gavin Newsom recently created a $160,000-a-year job for a senior aide and gave him the ambitious-sounding title of director of climate change protection initiatives," Vega began. She continued, "One might expect someone with such an exalted handle to solve global warming and save the rain forest all in a day's work."
The day the ad/article appeared, I attended a downtown event where Crowfoot had been scheduled to publicly explain his new job. The audience was salted with winsome women, some carefully jotting down his words on lined paper, others gazing at him with faces cupped in hands, some glancing around the room as if to survey the competition. Newspapers, I contentedly imagined, remained an effective advertising medium.
I had you there until that last sentence, didn't I? Allow me to bring us back to reality by calling bullshit — on myself.
While these observations and details about the Feb. 20 Chronicle article, its writer, its subject, and the event I attended are real, I can't imagine Vega meant to pen a personal ad. She appears merely to be doing her job as a news reporter, provoking the latest convulsion of an ongoing pseudoscandal called Aidegate, in which the mayor tapped the budget of transportation bureaucracies to fund positions that at first glance seemed only tangentially related to transit.
Vega has been fulfilling, in other words, a seemingly voracious appetite these days among S.F. news consumers for bullshit, defined as communication that only pretends to inform.
Exhibit A is the fact that my nonsense about Crowfoot's supposed personal ad has lured you this far.
Exhibit B is the bullshit-stained yet wildly popular Aidegate story itself, which has remained alive on television, blogs, and newspapers despite the fact it conveys a misleading message that the mayor is being underhanded and incompetent when, in fact, it may be rare evidence of an attempt at effectiveness from Newsom.
Crowfoot's new job, with its squishy "change protection initiatives" title, stands out as a central culprit in Aidegate. The study was requested by Jake McGoldrick, a member of the "progressive" faction on the Board of Supervisors. It noted that money for Crowfoot's new position came from the city transit system's Safety and Training Unit. But the fact is that Crowfoot's new job seems designed to improve transit in the city far more effectively than adding another random bureaucrat in the transportation safety department would do.
As someone who has spent the past four years pointing out and then denouncing the myriad instances where Gavin Newsom only pretends to accomplish things, I'm obligated to praise him when he actually attempts to get things done. And during the past month the mayor has hired qualified staff members and briefed them with instructions to break bureaucratic logjams, chaperone controversial or complicated programs into fruition, and otherwise actually — gasp! — make the city a better place. Crowfoot's new job, while perhaps excessively lucrative, seems to fit this bill. For this the mayor should receive credit, not media-generated buncombe.
During his talk last Wednesday, Crowfoot explained that he sees his anti-global-warming task as coinciding with that of the Municipal Transportation Agency, which runs a bus and rail system that has been declining steadily, despite oceans of political rhetoric about how it needs to be saved.
"My job is focused on getting people out of their cars and reducing the 51 percent of pollution that comes from people driving to and from, and within the city," Crowfoot said. That, he added, requires "reprioritizing speed and efficiency within Muni."
What could be more innocuous? Who doesn't want the buses to run on time?
A lot of people, it turns out.
Taking the kind of controversial steps needed to promote this transit "mode shift" requires entering a political war zone with the skills of a diplomatic envoy. As the mayor's former liaison to the Board of Supervisors, Crowfoot is up to the task.
Streamlining bus movement can require turning some car-parking spaces into bus lanes; no privilege is more fiercely defended in San Francisco than parking. It also can mean redirecting favorite-yet-underused routes. And in this change-hating city, eliminating a single bus stop can mean facing a hearing filled with angry protesters. To further speed transit, Crowfoot said he'll chaperone a proposal called "congestion pricing" that relieves traffic, while making things easier for buses and pedestrians, by imposing a toll on drivers in the city's downtown core.
This has been a rousing success in cities such as London. But San Francisco's troglodyte Chamber of Commerce pooh-bahs have vowed to fight such a toll proposal until their steering wheels are pried from their cold, dead hands.
Crowfoot will also ensure that the city planning, transportation, and parking and traffic departments complete a series of detailed plans and environmental studies required to counter an anti-environmentalist lawsuit that attempted to stop the city from creating bike lanes. Officials have been laggard so far.
"The city is [currently] prohibited legally from making improvements on our citywide bike lane network, because of the California Environmental Quality Act, which, I would argue, is perverted," Crowfoot said. "This has not been moving along quickly enough. This requires an unprecedentedly complex coordination between departments. So I'm having a working group to see how people are moving ahead on that project."
To hear Crowfoot describe his agenda is to ask why the city's "progressive" supervisors, supposedly the most environmentally friendly cats in town, chose to raise a weeks-long public stink about his appointment. Why not rejoice that the mayor has appointed someone who can bust bureaucratic heads to establish bike lanes, improve bus service, and get people out of their cars?
It remains to be seen whether Crowfoot will follow through on his stated goals – or merely burn up jet fuel by helping Mayor Newsom brag to the world that he's an "environmental mayor." But it's only fair to give the two men a chance to achieve results before calling bullshit.
The subtext to the Aidegate story and the Board of Supervisors study that spawned it is that the "progressive" faction on the board has been bent on obstructing any policy favored by the mayor's office, no matter how much good it may do for the city. This is the outward sign of a brewing power struggle over whether the 2000 "progressive revolution" anti-dot-com-development backlash will end this year.
This November, six of the 11 seats on the board will be up for grabs; termed-out "progressives" will vacate three of them. During Newsom's first four years, an antidevelopment majority on the board managed to shape much of city policy. While races for the seats of North Beach Supervisor Aaron Peskin, Richmond District Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, and Outer Mission Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval haven't jelled yet, it's certain these district-by-district campaigns will become a battle to the death between dot-com-backlash holdovers and the mayor's allies.
The most intense skirmishes are reserved for what might be called the ground war, in which supervisors have run a scorched-earth policy of obstructing any project with the mayor's fingerprints on it, no matter how good it might be for San Franciscans. Raising hell over Crowfoot's appointment is a minor firefight in this cynical strategy.
The latest example: After six years and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of meetings, plans and redrafted plans to create an inviting neighborhood from the slums and hangdog stores along Market southwest of the Financial District were killed after the board sat on the project for more than a year.
"It's a dead plan," San Francisco redevelopment agency spokesman Benjamin Ibarra said. "It was submitted to the Board of Supervisors well over a year ago and no action was taken, and I believe it did not have the political momentum to move forward."
That plan would have created 3,300 apartments (of which 1,000 would be subsidized for lower-income people) and preserved historic buildings while creating an arts district along a boulevard that is, architecturally speaking, one of America's most beautiful. It currently harbors a string of porn shops and other low-rent storefronts, topped by blighted flophouses and ringed by some of the city's worst crime. The plan had the city's first-nighter crowd swooning over the idea of a fortified theater district extending along Market.
Why would the Board of Supervisors block such a plan after so much effort and hope? One clue: Back in 2005 Gavin Newsom was quoted as saying the proposed redevelopment represented "opportunities to revitalize areas of the city that have been utterly underused."
Environmentalists agree that building up the density of America's central cities, instead of building out suburban sprawl, is key to reducing the amount of carbon-based fuel burned by commuters. This is logic San Francisco's left-leaning supervisors seem to reject. They've put their backward philosophy into action by sabotaging other Newsom-backed efforts to turn San Francisco into a more environmentally responsible and affordable city.
"Progressive" Supervisor Chris Daly has sponsored a ballot measure designed as a "poison pill" to sabotage a Newsom-backed plan to build 10,000 housing units in Bayview-Hunters Point. He's also attempting to scuttle plans for 6,000 new homes on Treasure Island — all under the misleading rubric of "affordability." Green Party Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, meanwhile, has attempted to laden the University of California with a new set of developer obstacles on a mixed-use development it plans to build along the Market Street corridor, potentially killing hundreds more units. In all, these moves stand to eliminate thousands of proposed subsidized and market-rate apartments.
By sabotaging these projects, Gavin Newsom's opponents ensure he remains a do-nothing mayor. Never mind that this spawns demand for development that is an hours-long commute from the city, helping pollute the environment and warm the globe.
This brings us back to Crowfoot, and his job of improving San Francisco transportation in the name of Mother Earth.
San Francisco is not the first city to promote a significant transportation "mode-shift" away from automobiles in the name of saving the environment. That honor goes to Davis, 85 miles northeast of here. During the mid-1960s, it became the first city in the car age to stripe bike lanes on its streets.
"A group of us in the faculty, along with some townspeople, we collected signatures," retired U.C. Davis psychology professor Bob Sommer recalls. "But the city council at the time pooh-poohed this, and said we needed to get modern. There were two bike-lane candidates up for election on the city council. And when they won, it was good riding after that."
In the ensuing years Davis became America's bicycle city, with lanes and racks required to be a part of every new development. A bicycle is featured on the city logo in this curious municipality where, as of the 1990 census, more than one-fifth of all trips were taken on two wheels.
By 2000, however that percentage declined by 5 percent, UC Davis bicycle coordinator David Takemoto-Weerts told me. Lately, bicycle traffic seems to have dropped off even more, Sommer said.
As in the Bay Area, housing shortages in Davis have lengthened commutes to and from nearby communities. Rising housing prices mean students and teachers travel in from rapidly sprawling Woodland and Dixon, 10 miles away.
"A lot of people working in Davis can no longer afford to live in Davis because of the high cost of housing," Takemoto-Weerts said. "Those are the really important factors for that decline" in bicycle commuting.
In other words, it's hard to promote the kind of mode-shift Crowfoot says he'd like to achieve in the face of a sprawl-inducing housing shortage, no matter how many climate-friendly policy changes we pursue. So "progressive" doesn't mean much when so-named supervisors seem willing to sabotage plans for housing infill, foisting carbon-burning sprawl upon the rest of the Bay Area.