All You Need Is Just a Little Patience
After a long, raucous day of debate that lasted even longer than last night's ball game, the Board of Supervisors stared straight into the eyes of several controversial, contentious issues and decided to make a decision later.
We start with everyone's favorite topic, or at least SFist's, the medicinal marijuana debate. After holding off on making a decision last week, the Board took it up yesterday and was about to pass the measure before former Daly aide Bill Barnes pulled a fast one and derailed it by calling an appeal on environmental concerns. Daly is against the legislation for the fairly understandable reason that due to a lot of the new rules, most of the dispensaries that will be kept open or will be opened will be in his 'hood. He also thinks that all of the new rules and regulations are too restrictive and will lead to many of the dispensaries having to close (which would mean he wouldn't have to worry about too many of them being in his 'hood, but we digress). And by too restrictive, we're guessing he means the fact that dispensaries can only dispense half a pound of marijuana to one person a day (that would be about eight ounces of dope). That's more dope than a van full of Dead Heads on the road to the Bonnaroo Festival could smoke. Or maybe it's because it's so difficult these days to get medical marijuana cards.
Either way, the debate over marijuana dispensaries has led to a bit of a squabble between Chris "Mad Dog" Daly and Ross "Mr. Green" Mirkarimi. Quoth Daly on his blog: "Instead of consolidating his progressive base and fighting back against this reactionary push, Mirkarimi cut a deal. ... But when you deal with the devil, it usually comes back to bite you." That Ross, what a sell out.
Drawing of City Hall from SFSwan.org
The other big contentious issue was that of Home Depot. For ten years, Home Depot has been trying to get a store into San Francisco city limits. They finally find a place to put one at an old, abandoned building on Cortland Ave and Bayshore and have been trying for the past several years to open up a store there. Enter the NiMBYs.
Proponents, mostly from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, say the Home Depot could mean jobs and tax revenue for an area that can't claim to have very much of either. Opponents, most of them who don't come from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, say chain stores don't provide real wages and health care and chase out local business. Proponents retort that zero times anything is still zero and something is better than nothing. To which opponents haughtily shake their head in self-righteousness and sneak off to the Home Depot in Colma with their "Nader/LaDuke" clad cars when nobody is looking.
The debate yesterday was over an environmental impact report that opponents forced the development to go through, one which stated that there wouldn't be that much of an environmental impact. So the opponents went to the more faith-based Board for an appeal. After a long, six hour hearing and a 6-5 vote, the Board decided to decide the issue next week in hopes of wringing more concessions out of the Home Depot.