After channeling Grampa Simpson last year, Gavin appears to be channeling another person at the start of 2007, that of an attendance officer. After complaints were made about attendance problems with various city commissions and problems tracking them, the whip is now going to be cracked whip to make it so City Hall can know who is a flake and who is not.

The problem was that before there was no way of tracking who was attending and who wasn't. Besides the fact nobody really saw the records as they sat in the commission offices, the records didn't really do a good job of saying who was there, who wasn't, who was late and who left early. Also, each commission had different attendance sheets so there was no way to standardize them and track them.

All of this comes from a resolution passed in August calling for more stringent attendance records. City Hall said they noticed something was up due to constant records mentioning the attendance of a "Dick Hurtz" and "Pink Floyd." As for as anybody knew, there was no record of a Mr. Hurtz or a Mr. Floyd being assigned to a commission. For now on, records will be standardized and sent to City Hall where presumably they will go from being in on in-box to another.

In lieu of the story, the Examiner did some investigating and determined that while the bigger commissions don't have that many attendance problems, some of the smaller ones, like the Film Commission, do. Hopefully, tracking the records will solve some of the attendance problems and Gavin has said he won't appoint people who won't commit. And as we all know, people in San Francisco have no problems with committing.