Today in As the Gav Turns

Man, we thought we'd be able to get through a week without any sort of Gavin bombshell, but we were wrong. As the saying goes, everytime we think we're out, he pulls us back in.

So today there's a big story about Ruby Rippey-Tourk taking a paid ten-week leave of absence maybe illegally, maybe not. Basically, the time off given to her was not commensurate with the amount of time she worked. Now, employees down in city hall are allowed to give their sick time to somebody if they really, really need it and supposedly, Ruby's fellow coworkers donated their time to her. The question, of course, is whether or not they did it out of the kindness of their own hearts or whether Gavin asked them to while making all sorts of hints about how they should really, really donate their time. The Bay Guardian is reporting that the time off was requested by her husband, Alex and that her coworkers wanted to help out. Fog City, however, says that her coworkers weren't very down with it all. The other thing is that the money she was given was much more than normally allowed.

Now the controversy is over it was favoritism or hush money or something like that, all this on the taxpayers dime. Dennis Herrera, the city attorney, is looking into it and Gavin's people are looking into it. Gavin himself actually braved an interview with Dan Noyes and said all of this was done on the up and up. So all of this could be something or it could be nothing.

Dan Noyes has some more juicy tidbits too. One of them being that Alex, Ruby, and Gavin all took sexual harassment classes together. Talk about tension city. After taking the class, Gavin signed a certificate saying he won't do any harrasin'. You can read the certificate here.

Finally, in a speech to the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association at City Hall called "The Newsom Administration Year 3: A Public Policy Report" Gavin said that he can't really give himself good marks in several items, from crime to clean streets. He told them that he made 369 pledges and only came through on about 71% of them which, according to our calculator, comes out to about 262 of them. As we all know, 71% is a C- unless you're grading on a curve or maybe adding points for effort or giving extra credit for staying and cleaning the erasers. Gavin did say he's done a good job on the economy and helping business but then said he's done badly on a bunch of things and that he'll do better. Hey, maybe that could be his relection slogan: "Trying to Be Above Average."