The defeat of the Mid-Market Street billboard plan last week was close because proponents hid the details over who would handle the funds coming from large ads, says the opposition’s key organizer.
Category: Elections
Posted inBay Area, Elections, Media, Public Safety
Oakland’s community policing program continues to face challenges
Officer Clay Burch is one part of the three-pronged approach that makes up Measure Y, in which community police are complemented by street outreach teams. PSOs and outreach teams link young people to the actual programs that help create foundations for a better life. And for Burch, improving Oakland’s toughest neighborhoods happens one building, and one person, at a time.
Posted inCity Hall, Elections, News
Special sign district on SF’s Mid-Market faces ‘uphill battle’
Warfield Building owner David Addington said he spent several years, working to bring general advertising back on Market Street from Fifth to Seventh streets, in hopes of returning the central city stretch to its former glory days as a theater district.
Although his enthusiasm for the special district hasn’t dimmed, a sense of reality has crept in as opposition to the initiative, Proposition D, mounts.
Posted inCity Hall, Elections, News
Half reviewed signs are ‘illegal’
Planning Department Ombudsman Dan Sider probably knows more about billboards than anyone in the city.
Posted inElections, Fact Check, From the Newsroom, News
The Truthiness Report: Fact-checking SF election ads
In the weeks leading up to Election Day 2008, The Public Press joined with Newsdesk.org in a unique noncommercial news collaboration to fact-check the dizzying array of voter propositions on the San Francisco ballot.
The project, which was co-published on Newsdesk.org and Public-Press.org, with segments broadcast on Crosscurrents Radio on KALW-FM, took to task the spinmeisters who flooded San Francisco neighborhoods with fliers containing truths, half-truths, and “truthiness.”
Posted inElections, Fact Check, News
SF Election 2008 Proposition Fliers Decoded
View a sampling of dozens of fliers distributed in San Francisco to sway voters for and against propositions at our Flickr site — and mouse over the graphics to read our reporters’ commentary.
Posted inElections, Fact Check, News
Prop. D: Consensus on Pier 70?
By Bernice Yeung, Newsdesk.org/The Public Press Although development is a perennially hot-button topic in San Francisco due to concerns about gentrification, Proposition D, which would facilitate Pier 70 revitalization, is a seemingly controversy-free measure that has garnered wide support from neighborhood groups, environmentalists, city officials and developers. Pier 70 is a 65-acre site along the […]
Posted inElections, Fact Check, News
JROTC and Proposition V: Lessons in How Not to Listen
• Sidebar: “Moderate vs. Progressive?”
For a measure that is completely nonbinding there is much sturm und drang around the “Policy Against Terminating Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) in Public High Schools.”
Debate is a limited commodity in the case of Proposition V; instead the two sides talk past and through each other — loudly and heatedly. They also make claims that cannot be verified.
Posted inElections, Fact Check, News
Prop. A: The Specter of a City Without a Lifeline
By Matthew Hirsch, Newsdesk.org/The Public Press View our annotated Flickr collection to see how pro-Propositon A activists are spinning the issue in campaign fliers. The proponents of Proposition A want voters to believe that the Nov. 4 election is a matter of life or death for San Francisco’s main public hospital. The measure […]
Posted inElections, Fact Check, News
Prop. M: The Latest Battle in San Francisco’s Rent Wars
View our annotated Flickr collection to see how pro- Proposition M activists are spinning the issue in campaign fliers.
Rancorous is always a good way to describe tenant-landlord relations in San Francisco, and the debate over Proposition M — an anti-harassment initiative put on the ballot by tenants’ rights activists — is no exception.
The inelegantly dubbed Changing the Residential Rent Ordinance to Prohibit Specific Acts of Harassment of Tenants by Landlords attempts to do just that — at great length, and has spurred an exchange of pro and con arguments around free speech and the role of lawyers.