With the eyes of every reporter and politico on today's budget-cutting Board of Supervisors meeting, the city's Ethics Commission will open discussion this afternoon on myriad changes to the city's lobbyist ordinance, including whether to do away with rules preventing consultants from accepting pay from a third party to lobby the city officials who employ them. In a nutshell, the city's rules currently state that consultants hired by city officials are not allowed to accept pay from some other p
Sure you can give a suit like this to a city official. Just remember to report it within 10 days.On Friday we reported on how an ad campaign pushed by San Francisco's firefighter union -- but conspicuously not listing the union's name -- apparently violated San Francisco's lobbying laws. In this city, lobbyists must register with the Ethics Commission -- and unions must register as lobbyists whenever they bend city officials' ears on matter other than wages and hours. After initially denying tha
Whether an orchestrated campaign to spur the general public to call or write their city councilmen is benevolent or nefarious depends upon the cause at hand. But to argue that such a campaign doesn't constitute "lobbying" is to take up a losing battle with the good folks at Merriam-Webster. The ad to the right appeared Thursday on the San Francisco Chronicle's Web page; clicking on it took one to a site called "Save Our Neighborhood Firehouses." You won't find out who wants you to save the fireh
A deft film in which a southland legislator and lazy journalists rewrite history, blame Enron for the energy crisis, and leave Sacramento corruption untouched
Once-secret documents reveal the tobacco industry's battle to gut anti-smoking education in California. Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and former Gov. Pete Wilson helped.
Barack Obama kicked off his presidency by limiting his administration's vulnerability to lobbyists. By May, however, it seemed clear that resourceful Democratic Party insiders would circumvent the limited ban. San Francisco's Amazon Watch has just denounced former Clinton Administration trade representative Mickey Cantor for violating the spirit of the Obama rules by lobbying his old bureaucracy on behalf of Chevron Texaco. Cantor has been lobbying the U.S. government to help quash $27 billion i
The San Francisco Examiner this week reported that while the lobbyists San Francisco employs to push for the city's interests in Sacramento and elsewhere are required to file reports detailing how they're spending nearly half a million dollars of public money four times a year, they have, in fact, only filed one report since 2005. Too bad no one's being paid to lobby for accountability!This serves as yet another opportunity to reference Casablanca, in which Captain Renault was "shocked, s
Yesterday we reported on how, despite detailed complaints from the public, San Francisco's lobbyists were skipping out on requirements to file with the Ethics Commission and report how they're using public money. Now, open government activists, spurred into sifting through some of the city's Sacramento lobbying activity, are not pleased with what they've found. They accuse San Francisco of a dubious trifecta: 1. Using city money to; 2. lobby for state laws restricting public access to governm
Whether you're a king or just a street-sweeper, sooner or later you dance with the ... State Legislation CommitteeWe've written a bit about how San Francisco recently officially lobbied for a state Assembly bill that would limit public access to government data. AB 1336 would allow cities to mount cameras on street-sweeping vehicles to bust parking scofflaws -- but declares the resultant footage is not subject to the California Public Records Act, making it inaccessible to the public. Governm
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