D10 Dustup - Stop looking at my package

From SFGate,

The brouhaha started with an invitation for a meet-and-greet later this month with Tony Kelly, who is challenging Supervisor Malia Cohen in the district including Bayview-Hunters Point and Potrero Hill.

Read all about it at SFGate

Stop looking at the package!

It's funny, the first time I read the "Stop looking at the package and start looking at the contents" line, I just assumed they were talking about Tony Kelly.

In the four years I've been running this blog, I admit I have heard people use Supervisor Cohen's good looks and taste in clothes as a way to devalue her competence. The assumption being that a good looking person, not just Cohen but anyone, no matter how smart, must have used their looks to have gotten where they are. But absent any proof, it's just assumption, and needs to be left out of the equation as to whether the person is an effective legislator or not.

Supervisor Cohen can't change her looks any more than Tony Kelly can. As Kelly said in a 2010 debate when someone questioned how he as a white man could represent blacks in our community, "I was born white and will always be white. I can't change that." The fact is Kelly's race and Cohen's looks have no bearing on either person's ability to represent those who are either not white or not supermodels, and it's a shame that either is even mentioned in this context.

Now, if only Tony Kelly would stop wearing pleated pants, we'd all have fewer distractions in this race.

D10 Supervisor Race and the "United Front" against Malia Cohen

Malia Cohen

With the vote for D10 Supervisor still six months away, the race has already lost its first candidate, and some of those remaining have banded together to take on an "Anyone But Cohen" posture.

Tony Kelly

The Potrero View reported this month that a couple of Bayview candidates - Ed Donaldson, DeBray "Fly Benzo" Carpenter, and Shawn Richard - and Marlene Tran from Visitacion Valley had joined Potrero Hill's Tony Kelly in the race to unseat incumbent Malia Cohen on November 4.  Donaldson, who garnered just 206 votes in 2010, has yet to file with the ethics commission, making him a candidate on paper only and unable to raise any money until he does.  Diane Wesley-Smith had filed her intent to run early on, but this week pulled out "to prevent a fiasco like the last election when we had over 20 candidates."

Marlene Tran

Of the five candidates running against Cohen, 36, Tony Kelly arguably has the strongest shot at unseating the incumbent.  In 2010, Kelly came in just ahead of Cohen in the first round of ranked choice vote tallying, but was felled by strong 2nd and 3rd place vote counts for Cohen that allowed her to prevail over him 52.7% - 47.3%.

Unlike Kelly, 51, who announced his campaign in February, Tran admits that her "very late entry" into the race was a "quick decision".  At least for now, she seems less prepared to make a run than she did four years ago, but given her strong third place finish in 2010, the 67 year-old Tran could become a viable candidate if she applies herself over the next six months.  A recent 2:30AM email from her indicates she knows that she has to "work extra hard now."

Interestingly, in posting her message to Nextdoor announcing her withdrawal from the race, Diane Wesley-Smith also announced the creation of what she calls a "United Front" of Marlene Tran, Ed Donaldson, and Tony Kelly against Malia Cohen.  Although perfectly fine to do, if they truly wanted to show a united front, wouldn't rallying behind the most viable candidate be the best way to do that?  Wesley-Smith's action of pulling out makes the most sense, while Tran and Donaldson appear to be spending time, energy, and possibly public money running campaigns they must know are at best long-shots to win.  Why not endorse Kelly and energize their respective bases to raise money and vote for him in the #1 slot?  Although it'll get their respective issues out in front of voters, instead of showing unity, this strategy may come across as fractious and even vain on their part.  On the other hand, this "united front" may be their way to help Kelly engage communities where he has a perceived or real racial and/or linguistic barrier in connecting with voters who look up to Tran and Donaldson and whose appeal could help get voters to the polls.  The collective wisdom of the candidates may be that Kelly has a better shot at getting a #2 vote on a Tran or Donaldson ballot than he would getting a #1 vote if it were just him up against Cohen.

Playing a purely hypothetical numbers game, in 2010 20550 voters cast ballots in the Supervisor race (I'll keep Ed Donaldson out of my calculations, as he garnered less than 1% of the total vote in 2010 and his influence on the race this year seems limited).  Of those, 3330 voted Tran in the #1, 2, or 3 slot. If we assume a similar vote total in 2014, and if votes follow the same pattern as the second-to-last round of RCV in 2010, with just three main candidates we'd have Cohen 7850, Kelly 6658, and Tran 6206.  If a similar proportion of Tran's votes were to go to Kelly and Cohen as they did in 2010, then Kelly would pick up about 60% and Cohen 40%.  This would put them neck-and-neck, with only 50 votes between the two.  

But 2010 was a race in which there was no incumbent, and everyone was, to a degree, and unknown entity.  Today we have to ask, what is Cohen's incumbency advantage?  The fact that she is addressed as "District 10 Supervisor Malia Cohen" at every event she attends should give her an advantage.  Successes such as the new Grocery Outlet store and a preliminary agreement to put 1700 affordable homes at Schlage Lock in Visitacion Valley should help her.  But if opponents are to be believed, Cohen negatives outweigh her positives, and she may be so unpopular as to not have an advantage at all.  Issues like her support for redistricting Potrero Hill out of D10, Fresh & Easy closing down its Bayview store, and lack of support from many city leaders regarding a homeless shelter at Mother Brown's in Bayview are seen by opponents as a tarnish on her advantage that makes her weak.

Despite these things, a strong possibility remains that voters could ignore the tarnish and give Cohen the benefit of the doubt in November as they often do incumbents.  Similarly, Tran voters could ignore or be totally unaware of her endorsement of Kelly and choose the known over the unknown in their #2 vote.  Cohen's opponents are going to have to sow and grow an awful lot of doubt and discontent in the minds of a sizable chunk of voters to get them to make the leap of faith and call for a change.  Doing so without sounding mean and nasty is a political knife edge they'll have to walk.  Not impossible, but challenging to be sure.

Should be interesting to see what the next six months brings.

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Note: I was appointed by Supervisor Cohen in 2012 to the SFCTA-CAC.  I will do all I can to keep my personal opinions  about the race to myself, but if anything (including the above article) appear biased toward Supervisor Cohen in any way, please call me out, point out where you see the bias, and I'll endeavor to do better in the future.

RCV: A year after D10, we now see how it works (or doesn't) citywide

You can see how things actually played out in our D10 election last year at http://www.sfelections.org/results/20101102/data/d10.html

After the first round of RCV, there were 17808 votes in the pool. By Round 19 that had fallen to 8200.  So, yes, only 46% of the ballots made it that far, and Supervisor Cohen's 4321 first, second, and third place combined votes were enough to beat Tony Kelly's 3879.  In the first round, Kelly had 2102 and Cohen 2097, while Lynette Sweet had 2150, topping both of the eventual final round candidates. The point here is that Kelly and Cohen were more 'palatable' than Sweet, across the three choices.  Had we had a simple runoff style election based solely on first round voting, the choice would have been between Sweet and Kelly, not Cohen and Kelly.  

You've got to ask, too, how many people come out one month after having just voted for another election?  Would 46% of the people who were interested enough the first time around vote again?  Barely. In the last couple of elections in which we had run-off elections, voter turnout dropped roughly 50% (http://www.sfrcv.com/) between November and December.  

So, in 2010, if we'd had a run-off election, it would have been between Kelly and Sweet, and perhaps 8900 people (50% of the November election) would have cast ballots. It would have been a close election, and whoever won would have done it with somewhere slightly over 4450 votes.  While we would have ended up with someone different, the vote tally that got them there would have been nearly the same as using RCV.

RCV isn't perfect, it's made out to be more confusing than it really is, but does it lead to voter suppression, or your vote not counting in the end?  Maybe.  If we didn't have RCV during the 2010 election, people who voted for any one of the candidates who didn't end up in the run-off would be given the chance to choose again in December between the remaining highest vote-getters.  With RCV, people who voted for a losing candidate the first time and whose ballots were exhausted were not given the chance to select their preference from the remaining candidates.  In the end, 9600 voters for whom neither Kelly nor Cohen was their choice are left with a supervisor they didn't put in their top three.  So did 4300 voters override the 9600 to put Cohen in office?  Seems that way to me, but I could be wrong.

I suspect the bottom line is that 3-choice RCV works for a small number of candidates, but for the numbers we saw in D10 last year and in the Mayor's race this year, it falls apart.  Perhaps RCV should be changed so that when the number of candidates is below 10, you get three choices; below 20, you get four; above 20, you get five choices.

Now, for some levity, check out a NSFW (some swear words) video from just after last year's election:

http://d10watch.blogspot.com/2010/11/who-wants-to-be-mayor.html

Tony Kelly Concedes the Race to Malia Cohen

From Tony Kelly:

Tonight, I offered my congratulations to District 10's next Supervisor, Malia Cohen. I came in second in the ranked-choice runoff, by a few hundred votes. (The final count is still in the works, and will be certified by November 30.)

Preliminary RCV...

SF Elections has Malia Cohen winning over Tony Kelly (although unlike the other supervisor races, they don't seem to be 'calling it' yet, so they're thinking that it could change) after 19 rounds of elimination. If this holds, then it's exactly what I figured - if Kelly couldn't pull it out with four or five left in the race, either Sweet or Cohen would win. I suspect it's actually between Cohen and Sweet at this point, as in Round 18, Cohen's less than 200 votes ahead of Sweet, so in theory, if things break only slightly differently in a recount, then she could conceivably win. Of course, it could conceivably break such that Kelly holds on, too.

http://www.sfelections.org/results/20101102/d10.html

They have it coming down. in order:
1. Cohen
2. Kelly
3. Sweet
4. Tran
5. Moss

These numbers are preliminary, and could change - stay tuned!!

Top five

Initial numbers show that fewer than 10000 votes were cast in D10 for supervisor.

The top five vote-getters in round 1 of counting are:

Tony Kelly 1279
Lynette Sweet 1160
Malia Cohen 1150
Steve Moss 1089
Marlene Tran 944

It likely won't be until Friday that we maybe know who won. I still see it coming down to Kelly and either Cohen or Sweet.

Creepy, revisited

A few weeks ago, I posted about the creepy piece of mail I'd received at my office regarding three candidates. I wasn't going to do anything exposé style, which is what I think the sender had intended, so all I did was inform the three candidates that I'd received them, and then mostly just sat on them. At the time, one of the issues, that of Ms Sweet's multiple tax liens on her home, had already been made public. Likewise, Tony Kelly had already addressed his theater company's tax problems here. So two of the three were old news. The third set of documents related to Ms Cohen's home foreclosure, but I'm not a news source that's here to break news, so since this was still in the realm of rumor in the media, I didn't think it my place to expose Ms Cohen's personal dirty laundry. However, now that she has publicly brought the issue to light, I can now mention all of these as the set of documents that I received that day.

Of course, a question immediately came to mind: who of the candidates would benefit from trying to smear three prominent candidates in this way, two of whom are moderates, and one who lives in Potrero Hill? Maybe it was sent to me by an overzealous supporter of another candidate. Maybe it was prepared and packaged up on the candidate's own kitchen table. Who knows? What I do know is that only one candidate took note of the fact that one of the debates was held at my workplace just one week before I received the smear package. So while I don't have any proof, I have a strong suspicion as to which Potrero Hill moderate, or an overzealous supporter of theirs, may have sent me that package.

As to Ms Cohen's foreclosure woe, I hope she has turned a corner with it. I don't understand the whole foreclosure process as well as I'd like, and hope never to have the opportunity to experience it as Ms Cohen and so many of our neighbors have. However, from what little I've read, it isn't easy to reverse a foreclosure once the bank has bought back the loan, so Ms Cohen could probably teach a course to those in her situation on how to do this. After getting the 'smear package' in the mail, my curiosity was naturally piqued, so I looked up online public records and found info on Ms Cohen's 2006 condo purchase, including the amount of the loan (it's amazing what's on the internet). Oddly, I also found a record online of the property being bought back by the bank on August 9th. Now, like I said, I don't understand the whole process, and haven't looked into this further, so I hope that maybe Ms Cohen can write in here in the comments section to clarify that part of this complex story. It's got to have been a wild ride, to be sure, especially when also trying to run for office. Best of luck, Malia!

Park-Friendly Candidates

In case you want to prep for tomorrow's NPC Forum:

2010 Park Friendly Candidate Ratings

NPC recognizes candidates as Park Friendly who not only demonstrate a love and appreciation of parks, but also knowledge of how parks in San Francisco function and specific challenges the system faces. Park management in such a geographically-limited, resource-scarce environment is very challenging and NPC looks to all of San Francisco’s elected officials to be informed, collaborative and community-minded as we work together to ensure neighborhood parks are clean, safe and fun.

Malia Cohen (Park Friendly)
Kristine Enea (Park Friendly)
Chris Jackson (incomplete questionnaire submitted)
Tony Kelly (Park Friendly)
Steve Moss (Park Friendly)
Eric Smith (Park Friendly)

The following Candidates did not return a completed questionnaire by the deadline:

* James Calloway
* Ed Donaldson
* Teresa Duque
* MJ Marie Franklin
* Rodney Hampton, Jr.
* Ellsworth “Ell” Jennison
* Nyese Joshua
* DeWitt M. Lacy
* Geoffrea Morris
* Jackie Norman
* Ashley Hawley Rhodes
* Diane Wesley Smith
* Lynette Sweet
* Marlene Tran
* Stephen Weber

District 10 candidates face diverse challenge - SFGate

John Wildermuth over at the Chronicle talks a bit about the crowded field of candidates and changing demographics in our supervisor's race, giving a relatively bare bones report, and not making mention of all the candidates who were in attendance at the Visitacion Valley Rec Center that evening.

Skeletons in Every Closet!?!

Steve Moss is getting a lot of attention at the SF Bay Guardian as allegations fly surrounding improprieties in residency, money diversion, ties to a group that promotes condo conversions and rails against tenant protections, etc. in articles in their paper:

Steve Moss, carpetbagger - 09/10/10
Steve Moss Responds - 09/13/10
Five Things You Should Know about Steve Moss - 09/14/10
Plan C Endorses Sweet and Moss - 09/21/10
The Real Steve Moss - 09/23/10

No other candidate has gotten this kind of scrutiny besides Lynette Sweet:

Lynette Sweet and IRS Strange Story - 09/02/10
Lynett Sweet, the "no-comment" candidate - 09/20/10
Plan C Endorses Sweet and Moss - 09/21/10
Lynette Sweet's Finances: Curiouser and Curiouser - 09/27/10

Why is it that SFBG and other local news outlets aren't pressing the other candidates on the skeletons in their own closets that are perhaps just as bad, or, at the very least, simply raise questions about these candidates' willingness to disclose information to voters or help us figure out how they'd operate as our supervisor?

Has Ms Sweet's tax evasion "mix-up" simply faded and become a non-issue? Maybe not, as SFBG has a piece on it today and BeyondChron mentions it as a reason Ms Sweet has dropped out of the lead pack. An allegation by a commenter here on D10CanWatch regarding a large unpaid tax bill for Tony Kelly's "Thick Description" theater company may raise eyebrows, and questions like these need to be answered directly by the candidates so as to tamp down the rumor-mill. As Mr. Kelly responds to voters, in part,

"Like so many small theatre companies in this economy, the one I ran - Thick Description - has had its share of tough times.

"Thick Description has a significant tax debt to the IRS. The company has a proposed repayment plan for that debt, based on the proceeds of Thick Description's contract with another company to help them run their new theater, opening in the summer of 2011. While the IRS considers that repayment plan, and even during that repayment, the agency will hold liens on the company to protect its claim; those liens will be released as the debts are paid off over the coming five years."

Read Mr. Kelly's full response here.

I've heard a couple of times as-yet-unfounded allegations regarding Ms Sweet and Ms Cohen actually living in the district. Of course, these latter allegations could be completely bogus, but since no one in the main stream media seems to be looking into these things and asking (and finding answers to) the truly tough questions of the candidates, we may never actually know.

I'm still waiting to hear back from Ms Sweet and Ms Cohen on these questions, but, in one case, a quick look in the phone book lists Malia J Cohen as living on Silliman Ave in 94134, which is indeed outside D10. Is this our candidate Malia Cohen's actual home? Her candidate filing papers all list a 94134 ZIP, but since the actual address is redacted in the publicly available version of those papers, it's not possible to tell anything more. If this is her, why is she listed in the phone book as living outside D10, and when did she purchase her home in D10 as she claims on her website to have done?

My point is, sure, some skeletons are less important than others, but are all the other candidates so squeaky-clean that the media isn't even going to do more investigation on them? Why aren't the candidates themselves publicly asking these tough questions of one another? Have they all taken a vow of silence on these issues, and if so, would that be the backroom kind of political dealings that we would want from our next supervisor?

Questions for the Candidates

Steve Moss (D10 Candidate and publisher of the Potrero View) asked me last week to compile for his newspaper some basic biographical information on the top candidates. Apologies to those I haven't asked for info, but my 'top candidates' are those who've garnered the greatest buzz (press), have collected the largest amounts of money (yes, money), and quite honestly, have the greatest chance of winning among the remaining 21 candidates.

I sent an email to all the candidates last week asking for basic stuff, and have heard back from... Steve Moss.

OK, candidates, if you're reading this, I'm not doing some Steve Moss-centric piece for the PV. I don't work for Mr Moss, and he's not paying me to do this. I'm posting what I find here on my site, as well as writing the piece for the PV. Potrero Hill is important to your election, and how you come across to the voters there WILL affect your chances of winning. I am writing this completely unbiased, and am basically putting in the PV information that you have on your websites or that is totally public if people care to go looking for it. I'm just doing the legwork for them.

For you to be cast in the absolute best light, it would behoove you to send me some info (pretty basic, really) instead of having the words 'no reply' next to the simple questions I've posed. If I can't find info on your website, you're going to get a 'no reply'.

My deadline is Thursday. It'd be great to hear from all y'all.

You'll find the stuff that I find on the left side of this page under the "D10 Candidate Pages" section.

- your humble blogger, Chris

Why I'm Voting For Tony Kelly

I'm voting for Tony Kelly because ...