Supes Spread Manure

"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.