Aw. This kind of sucks. School teacher Margaret Pavese got slapped with a misdemeanor charge for causing the 47+-acre Lick fire that erupted on Labor Day Weekend. Apparently, she was using a burn barrel to get rid on some refuse the environmentally happy way. Oops. According to the Chronicle, she could "face a maximum of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine...or all of the $13 million it cost to fight the fire, prosecutors......

According to a press release put out on PR Newswire by her attorney, Dr. Arlene Ackerman has filed suit against the San Francisco Unified School District in San Francisco Superior Court....

Well, some pretty good news for teachers in Ravenswood City School District: their union has managed to get them a little more scratch. ...

The East Bay Biz Times is reporting that Whole Foods is planning a major expansion throughout the East Bay. Yes, soon enough, Lafayette, Dublin, and Oakland will be able to experience the "whole paycheck" phenomenon. ...

It's good to be a starting lawyer at a big firm these days. Cal Law reports that a number of prominent, large, local firms keep raising salaries for staring associates, leading to peers to do the same. ...

"Ain't nothin' but a ballgame fellas, ain't nothin' but a thing."

That's probably what Baron Davis and Stephen Jackson were telling their teammates Tuesday night on the flight home to Oaktown after letting the Dallas Mavericks slip the hangman's knot in game 5, 118-112.

With the series now a little tighter at 3-2 in favor of the Warriors, the C word (choke) hangs over Tuesday's bobble like Adonal Foyle's contract against the Warriors salary cap. We're still seeing all this as a win-win though. Game 5 was an incredible game for playoff-starved Warriorphiles. Both teams played spirited ball. The Mavericks faced down elimination from the very brink of defeat. The Warriors had a chance to close out their opening round best-of-seven playoff series with the Mavs, but couldn't quite pull it off. The game featured great defense, clutch shots, a little intrigue (again), last-second heroics, and playoff drama -- everything a hoops fan expects from the postseason.

Fun fact: Muni is required to pay its drivers based on what the two highest-paying transit systems in the country offer. Right now, that works out to about $27 an hour, and amazingly, the Union likes that just fine. But you can spoil their good mood pretty quick by talking about tying compensation to performance. No no, the Union says, we'd like our pay to remain as high as possible. No need to base our......

File Under: Terminal Shopping Spring is springing all around us (Hello, Sunshine!) and while we can't afford to go on a real vacation on our salary, we can afford to dream. Which is why we love Flight 001....

We've learned so much about mayoral communications director Peter Ragone from this article in the Sunday Chron! Since it's a Sunday (and there's no Swells today), we're naturally giving it the SFist By The Numbers treatment. Peter Ragone's generational suffix: III. Other Peter the Thirds we found in history include: a remarkably unpopular Russian tsar and a king of Portugal who married his own niece. Ragone's salary: $118,468. The article didn't say how much sick......

You think Gavin Newsom'll shave off all his hair next, just like rehabbing Britney Spears? Okay, so where were we the last time we checked in with the Ruby Rippey-Tourk sick leave investigations? So the mayor's office and the Tourk family spokesman were taking the position that Rippey-Tourk got the city to cover her salary as paid sick leave during the time she was in rehab through the city's catastrophic-leave program, where people can......

So imagine you have a job. And imagine you're really good at your job. You know it, your coworkers know it, and your bosses know it. Now imagine that there's a management position that opens up which would be a great promotion for you. So you apply for it. You think you would be great at the job, your coworkers think you would be great at the job and your friends think you would be great at the job. Now imagine that instead of you getting the job, the head of the company give it to some snot nosed punk straight out of school with no experience. Welcome to Rob Ryan's world...

Alright, let's take a look at this Zito signing after we've all had a day to absorb everything. First, more details of the deal has been released. The key thing is that Zito will make only $10 million this year as he agreed to backload some of his salary to help the Giants and their budget. Which is another way of saying "have money left over for the other Barry." The signing should come soon. The Giants budget this year will be $92 million, their highest yet and about $12 million more than their standard $80 million. This all sounds well and good-- we like teams that spend to win, but one wonders what would have happened if they decided to break the bank earlier. Like, oh, resigning Jeff Kent. Or going after Vlade. Or another good starter to back up Jason Schmidt. ...

You know what hasn't been done yet? Barry Bonds' contract. In fact, while everyone is saying it's a done deal, it's not quite done, meaning that the i's haven't been dotted and the t's haven't been crossed and Barry Lamar's John Henry has not yet been put on a piece of paper. ...

--SF Director of Emergency Services Annemarie Conroy has been demoted (but is keeping her salary). --Ridership is up on BART. --Surfers love Ed Jew. --It wasn't as exciting waiting for a Playstation 3 as you'd've thought. --The housing market tanked last month. We feel a little bad for the guy who got underbid on his house, and then had to overbid to buy a new one. --Cancer columnist Alicia's still addicted to painkillers. --Anti-bike......

Launching a new column -- this one on the indictment of San Jose mayor Ron Gonzales! We thought we saw some bubbling vats of tar and a pile of feathers from freshly-plucked fowl in San Jose the other day -- the San Jose city council's got humiliation on the mind, after being told by their city attorney that no, they couldn't force Ron Gonzales to resign, even with those criminal charges pending against him. So......

A couple of days ago, the Niners announced that they finally had their front office football guy and hired him. The new honcho: Lal Heneghan. Heneghan, 42, worked for seven years with the NFL and was vice president of football operations for the Cleveland Browns 2.0 from 1999-2004. Heneghan is supposedly a whiz at contract negotiations and the whacky world of the NFL salary cap, a job that has become one of the most important in the NFL. He will work directly under head coach Mike Nolan and VP of Player Personnel Scot McCloughan....

Welcome, readers, to an all-too-rare edition of SFist Answers, where we pretend to know stuff. Today's theme: crying. Let's make people cry. Fun!...

Remember how we said the Rai-duhs weren't going to release Kerry Collins? Oops. Yesterday they officially released Collins in an attempt to save the Raiders 9.1 million against the salary cap. We had actually thought Collins was that much safer because of the new CBA which raised team's salary cap to $102 million and gave the Raiders more money, but we were wrong. ...

Tomorrow, teams in the NFL have to announce whom they're keeping and whom they're releasing. After that happens, it’s free agent signing time. So Tomorrow is the start of football's Hot Stove Heater, or whatever it is they call it in the NFL. Yep, it's the time of year where one can sit around and dream up any ole thing (Daunte AND T.O. to the Rai-duhs!) even though it'll never happen and only makes people extremely disappointed when it doesn't happen. See Giants fans still better that the Giants never signed Vlad. As much as we love all this, we much prefer baseball's free agent dreaming as the salary cap weighs way too much in all of this and let's just say SFist barely made it through Physics for Poets. This year we find the Bay Area teams at opposite sides of the salary cap spectrum. The Niners got rid of some deadweight (like Ahmed Plummer) and are rolling in dough. That sounds great except the Niners front office still appears to be Dysfunction Junction and unable to agree on much of anything. Good luck with that, Niners fans. ...

This week, the San Francisco symphony was performing an all Russian program which will definitely be one of the highlights of its upcoming trip to China. However, the trip was momentarily on hold, as the renegotiation of the musicians contract was proving unsatisfactory. They just reached an agreement this Monday morning, which they should sign and disclose very soon. The main sticking point: musicians want a pay package in the middle of the zone defined......

Saturday: There are a disturbing number of options for New Year's Eve, but we're going with Friends of SFist and R.E.M. tribute band Chronic Town, which is playing a cover free show at Ireland's 32. It all gets started at around 9 p.m., and we hear there'll be free champagne at midnight. Sunday: Are you kidding? If we leave the house at all on Sunday, we'll consider it a major accomplishment. If we do......

Dang, if we'd known you could make that much money in academia, we'd've studied harder for the GREs! The UC faces yet another embarrassment, as it now comes out that in the wake of tuition increases and department cutbacks, the academic admin staff is routinely pulling down salaries of over $300,000 -- to do nothing. Former Cal chancellor Robert Berdahl got an annual salary of $315,000 for a 13 month leave, provost MRC Greenwood is on a 15 month leave at a $301,840 salary, and the former head of the Lawrence Berkeley labs is finishing up a one-year leave at $336,000. This is all despite the fact that the UC put a policy in place against this back in 1994. The Regents explain that these folks are taking their leaves as administrators before they return to teaching -- because in part their salaries are significantly lower as mere professors ($130,000 for Berdahl, for instance), and these faculty members say they've been using the time off to work on books and lectures. The UC's been having a hard time explaining their pay practices lately -- the Chron's also uncovered evidence that as part of a lawsuit settlement, another administrator from Davis is receiving $200,000+ with no official job duties, all administrators got 3% merit pay raises, as tuition goes up 8-10%. They've called in an outside auditor. ...

The Examiner reports that new Muni transportation director Nathaniel P. Ford, Sr. (we love that name -- doesn't he sound like the guy who should be on the $7 bill or something?) wil become San Francisco's highest paid official when he takes over the position next year. His base pay will be $298,000, but he has eligibility for up to "$337,000 when all compensation is taken into account." We got excited hearing that last......

Earlier this week, State Senator Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, called for hearings into salary compensation and raises in the University of California system. Apparently, the UC people have been hiring a bunch of people at mid-level salaries, and then gave them all sorts of extra goodies. Not to mention kick-ass raises. All this would be all well and good except for the fact nobody at UC let the Powers That Be know that they were going to do this. Oh, and they just cut a whole bunch of student services and raised fees too. In short, juicy salary raises + lots of free stuff + cuts to student services= pissed off people. ...

Remember three years ago, when all your media-employed friends had to suddenly go from pulling down a dot-com salary to working retail and collecting unemployment? We spoke to a manager at a North Beach postproduction house a year ago, and he told us that even though most of their competition had gone out of business, they were still struggling -- there just wasn't any work. It was a rotten time. Well, good news: the......

...oh no!! The whale's back! The whale that was previously beached in Half Moon Bay that just washed out to sea a few days ago has resurfaced -- floating on the waters right by Half Moon Bay's Ritz-Carlton hotel. "It doesn't smell like incense," says a marine biologist, no doubt rubbing his hands together with glee. Hotel management claims they haven't had any complaints yet, but the Merc notes that "gelatinous blobs of dead whale" will probably start washing ashore any minute now. Oakland City Councilmember Desley Brooks is under investigation for accepting kickbacks. Brooks was apparently funneling money through the daughter of her boyfriend, who was getting paid $5200/month while enrolled in college on the East Coast. Brooks, who it sounds like is not the most popular councilmember in the world, claims it's all a setup by Council President Ignacio de la Fuenta to get her out of office. And two shootings in SF last night -- one at 26th and Treat, one in Crocker Amazon Park. Both victims are at SF General and the shooters remain at large. ...

So last week the Gavster announced this big, huge plan to build more housing, even low-cost housing. The point being, of course, the more housing the better, especially more low-cost housing, because the more housing you have, the less expensive housing will be. Gavin's idea is that with just the waving of the magic wand of better bureaucracy, the Department of Building Inspectors and the Planning Commission will have easier times allowing for more housing......

Sorry, couldn't resist the opportunity to go all Drudge on this one. Hot on the heels of settling his civil suit, Gerardo Sandoval seems to be telling anyone who'll listen that he wants Mabel Teng's old job at the City Assessor's office. Friend of SFist Alex Clemens at the Usual Suspects (he and Pat Murphy can fight over who scooped whom amongst themselves) sent the following report and analysis: Sandoval is alerting people to......

We asked some of our representatives last week about their feelings about the Terri Schiavo issue and the bill passed by Congress to allow her parents to sue. Guess what? No one got back to us, not even our favorite rep, Barbara Lee. Shame on you, unresponsive representatives....

SFist fully admits to being a fantasy sport geek, although just how big of a fantasy geek we are, we will never let anyone know. Suffice to say that our in-depth knowledge of the Brewers farm system ranks us pretty high. We also have to admit that for whatever reason, we've been having trouble getting into fantasy baseball this season. Early spring weather? An actual job? Too much time posting on SFist? Who knows. We......