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The Haight Street Underworld
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SFist Tonight
There's going to be some more clipboard-wielding petition signature gatherers near Burma Superstar, as a group of Geary Street merchants filed the official paperwork to launch a recall campaign against District 1 (The Richmond) supervisor Jake McGoldrick, for being insufficiently car-friendly. Insufficiently car-friendly? He only just biked to work for the first time in 2006!
The recall campaign, which is spearheaded in part by one of the six candidates who ran against McGoldrick for the Board of Supes seat and lost (David Heller), is focusing primarily on McGoldrick's support for closing down car access to Golden Gate Park for Healthy Saturdays and his failure to solicit community input on adding an extra bus lane to Geary. If the recall succeeds, Mayor Newsom picks the replacement. Man, bike- and bus-lovin' SF PartyParty's gonna go nuts about this.
The Committee To Recall Jake McGoldrick (as they're called; doesn't it sound like a bunch of people scratching their heads and being like, "Jake McGoldrick.... now who is he again?") is going to have to get 10% of Richmond registered voters to sign their petition in order to get the recall process started. That's about 3000-4000 people in the district, which is harder to get than you'd think. You may remember that Sophie Maxwell of District 10 faced a similar recall effort that fizzled out when almost 50% of the 6000 signatures gathered were found to be invalid.
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Heh, David Heller is a crank. He's been out to get the Geary BRT project cancelled since the beginning, citing such 'facts' as "nobody takes Muni to get groceries." Meanwhile, as anybody who has ever tried to get parking near a restaurant on Geary or Clement already knows, the 2 and the 38 are the only rational way for customers to get to the businesses he's trying so hard to protect. File under "wtf."
I've heard some locals gripe about evil McGoldrick's war on cars. What can I say? Tough titty!
Elmur Fudd should go on Gavin's diet plan and Gavin who is a bit to rexi for us women should get Elmur Fudd's Meals On Wheels plan
I loved this time Heller went off after the Transit Authority presented the results of their study on how BRT would effect parking...
Moving the busses into the center lanes, the curbside bus stops could be reclaimed to add more parking spaces than it has now. Someone must have spent a hell of a long time with a tape measure, but the idea is pretty simple right?
Heller went off on a tirade, claiming it was bs then going off on his usual rant that no one rides the bus, no one takes transit to go shopping and turned to the audience to ask if we'd ever even seen someone with grocery bags on a Muni bus.
Afterwards a lot of us in the audience were confused because you would think the merchants themselves would be happy to have additional parking.
I used to think that merchants knew something special about transportation and parking, but they're really no more knowledgeable than anyone else. Some insist that cars are the future, some transit, but few of them have any accurate idea how their customers get to their shops.
Economically though, their incentive is to slow traffic down to 5 mph on Geary so that everyone will have to shop at their stores.
These people suck. McGridlock is a moron buffoon who is a wealthy Alameda landlord. Ideological guffawing idiot. Heller is a nasty moron bigoted crackpot who speaks for no one except like 5 people. He's the conservative h brown. Miguel is a wannabe who just wants his name in the paper acting important.
SF politics - in all its glory!!!! We rule!!!!
David Heller is a fringe lunatic who receives far to much attention. The older he gets the nuttier he becomes. The guy is a impediment to progress and should be marginalized.
Yeah!!
I think McGoldrick is a crackpot for trying to stick parking meters in every possible spot in the City, calling the Mission Bay area "Downtown," and I can't wait to hear peoples' reactions to his notion about charging a freakin' toll to enter the "Downtown" area of San Francisco during business hours like they do in London.
And then he's holding up my free Wi-Fi so that I can tell Comcast to go take a .....
Out with McGoldrick, in with another Ed Jew ... please. We need some more adults on the Supervisors squad.
David Heller is worse than a crank, he's a fraud. The so-called Greater Geary Merchants and Property Owners Association is a mere shell for David Heller. No board of directors, no meetings, no elections, nada. This self-styled "merchants' association" represents nothing but the crackpot agenda of sorehead loser David Heller. Lest we forget, there is another culprit: Paul Kozakiewicz, whose motives can only be grabbing headlines in legitimate media for his pathetic monthly fishwrap. Only the First Amendment stands between him and a citizen's arrest for littering my property with his putrid rag. Hey Paul! Jake's terming out in a year! WTF?
Jamie W., don't be so quick with ditching Comcast. Chances are, unless you live in the perfect specifications of wireless reach, which I believe is no higher than a lamp post top and facing the street, there's no guarantee that you'll be getting "free" service. And even then, it will be sooooooo painfully slow that every time you try to post a comment on SFist, it'll time out. That's what happens when I have too many wireless divices on my network.
We've gotten our Progressive supervisors elected and re-elected here in San Francisco, and still the more reactionary elements do anything and everything in their power to go after them. I hope they weary of this pointless game.
Hey Yogo (6),
I wish I had 5 readers.
h.
I have a little handbill company that just past out 10,000 of the in the D1, and hope to do more.Cause Jake is a flake.
It’s just a minor footnote, but I think the recent closure of a number of large grocery stores in the Richmond is worth mentioning – as a twist to whatever this recall-schmecall thing is.
In the past year, the Albertsons on 32nd @ Clement closed its doors, same with the Cala on Geary/4th. The 7th Avenue Safeway is completely under construction and out of commission until the new one goes up (it’s rubble right now). Granted there are other places to get groceries, small produce and food providers, but most of the big guys that I would walk to, to get groceries, are gone. There’s now only the Safeway by the beach (LaPlaya?) and (not really Richmond) the stores in Laurel Village. For whatever that’s worth.
jj - That's cool, have fun with that. I'm no huge fan of Jake McGoldrick's or anything, although it's worth pointing out that he terms out in a year and a half anyway.
Just keep in mind that you're implicitly supporting David Heller's crusade to prevent bringing fast, reliable transit service to the busiest bus corridor west of the Mississippi. Hope you have a better reason than his unhinged nimbyism to justify your littering.
I don't see how you can call getting someone message out as littering but to each their own.As for David,David is David.But the last time this city designed a new transit corridor it damn near killed off all of the businesses along that corridor.Planning is not a strong suit in this city.
one more thing that I fail to address is hey if people want to spend the monies as well as time and effort to put the pressure on any politician to get them to do better I say go for it whether of not if they are termed out in six months or in 19.
And jj, pray tell, what transit corridor would this be that "damn near killed off all of the business"?
Name it and I'll bet I can punch through your "facts" in about 5 seconds.
Third Street
Dave I still waiting for you to punch holes in 5 seconds in to my facts.
Building a bus corridor is not going to have the same effect as construction of a light rail line:
- Light rail line has to be completely finished and thoroughly tested to meet rail safety standards before it could start service.
- Bus only lanes can be put into operation as soon as each segment is complete, and that's the plan. When the bus gets to the completed section, it just moves over to the outside lanes. Because you're looking at construction in segments, the project might take several years, but you're only getting effected for few weeks.
The TA likens the impact to resurfacing the road, though it's probably more akin to repaving the road while also rebuilding the sidewalks and replacing the street lights, a few weeks of work.A smart merchants would be campaigning for construction to start at their end. I would want to have it done and over with so I could take advantage of the situation
We've known for some time that Jake's a phoney. He's unresponsive to his constituents' needs (have you ever tried to call this guy?) and is generally more concerned about his salary raises and his next trip to France than he is about good governance.
I've also heard that though he bills himself as a labor leader, he ignores his duties as a union officer. A friend of mine who teaches at USF, where he has some union job, says he'd sell his mother for a pancake.
Did someone call Jake McgoldRICH a progressive? Or has the term simply been sapped of all meaning, whatsoever?
Ol' "progressive" pontificating Jake who not only owns property in Alameda, but is also a landlord in London (from whence he filches occasional urban planning notions suitable for transplantation), that is when he isn't alight at his Parisian pied-a-terre. Not that I begrudge the rumpled, erstwhile hippe any of the above, but where does he get away with styling himself a progressive? His wife is a lobbist/consultant for the multi-million dollar, out-of-town developers who are reshaping the city's seismically challenged skyline with 7 new, luxury, residential high-rises -- currently under construction, including the tallest building west of the Mississippi(with 32 residential skyscrapers of like kind in the approval pipeline). Has Jake sounded the claxon? No. But he has agreed to exempt these big developers from contributing their fair share to the City's affordable housing coffers by reducing their required percentage of contribution to the city's Inclusionary Housing Requirements from 15% to 12%. That's just the kind guy ol's generous Jake is. Meanwhile, Jake keeps bloviating from his bully pulpit about the lack of affordable housing in the City and what he is going to do fix it.
I'm completely in favor of recalling McGoldrick.
He's been forcing an agenda on his constituents that the majority of them never voted for and don't endorse. Frankly, his progressive ideologies are not only out of touch with the majority of his constituents but brazenly antagonistic to them as well. As an example, when his constituents voted for Care not Cash, he sought to overturn their vote.
And his reelection campaign, which garnered only a paltry 10% of the voters, was an exercise in cynicism and veiled bigotry. The only reason I would even have pause to reconsider supporting this recall effort is because it's run by the maniacal David Heller.
But seeing Jake turned out of office and humiliated will serve as a wake up call to the city's vain, self-righteous, and deluded progressives that we moderates will not be ignored any longer.
And if Jake gets tossed out, good riddance.