As promised, this week's Board of Supervisors meeting opened with an appearance from Temporary Mayor Ed Lee for Mayor Question Time. The best part of Mayor Question Time is that all of the supervisors actually call it that as though that were a serious name for a portion of our legislative process. Anyway, MQT went a lot smoother this month. Everyone remembered to submit their questions on time and Lee actually looked and sounded like he had read over his prepared responses before showing up before the board. But it was the follow up questions later on in the meeting that highlighted why the question time process is still just a clumsy game of whiffleball.

Before we even got in to questioning, a suddenly very self-aware Ed Lee latched on to the sports metaphors we've all been using to describe his previous appearance and ran with it, stating: "The questions and answers might not be as exciting as the ninth inning of a Giants game, but I think the public deserves less torture and more productivity." And dammit, you win this one, Ed Lee. Give your speechwriter a raise or something. +5 to Ed Lee because we're feeling generous and also he's still down nearly a billion points.

Moving on to the questions:

Addressing Mark Farrell's concerns about keeping the Niners in town and wooing the Warriors further westward, Lee said San Francisco is "the only fitting location for the team" while talking up plans for a new stadium in the old Hunter's Point Shipyard. He also gave himself a little pat on the back for renegotiating the Candlestick lease. Unlike Newsom, Lee has been trying to "build a foundation with Jed York." Apparently it's a pretty strong foundation because Jed York now sends Mayor Lee text messages with exciting news on the regular. As for the Warriors, Lee says he's no poacher - he won't go steal the team from Oakland, but he's armed and ready with plenty of research showing San Francisco could support an NBA team once the Warriors get tired of the Oracle Arena.

While answering Carmen Chu's question about helping out small businesses, Lee revealed his love for: A) corridors and B) newspaper racks. Although he didn't offer any real solutions, he pushed everyone to "get creative with small business", which we think means everyone should open up a pop-up shop for their handmade jewelry business. As for the newspaper racks, well - we're not really sure how those are supposed to help small businesses, but he seemed to think that the neighborhood corridors set to receive more of them would somehow be revitalized by their presence. We're still unclear how newspaper gentrification works.

+1 to Jane Kim for slipping in a happy birthday wish to Mayor Lee. The Mayor acknowledged he's "proud to be a Cinco de Mayo baby" just before the D6 supervisor unleashed her question about why the city hasn't been enforcing the sanctuary city ordinance. After a brief but unnecessary lesson in the history of San Francisco as a Sanctuary City, Lee basically explained that hey - balancing public safety with due process is hard! For now we'll be protecting some kids but not others, depending on whether or not they have family in the area. [Sidenote: Campos got really riled up about this later. More on that in a minute.]

While addressing Scott Wiener's concerns about the growing need for middle income housing, Lee revealed that his staff had done a "quick scan of realty websites" and discovered that there are plenty of sub-$400k homes available in the city. Luckily the Mayor's office isn't relying on their Craigslist research to make policy decisions, so he hopes the city can provide more resources for first-time home buyers and revise the inclusionary housing ordinance to allow for more mid-range housing options. Suddenly socialism sounds like a sunny two-bedroom in a nice neighborhood.

Finally, to ease Malia Cohen's worried mind about the now-defunct Potrero Power Plant in her district, the Mayor has given PG&E a 12-48 month timeline to figure out what they need to do to cleanup the site. As for what we're putting there, well, we'll just figure that out later.

Any more questions?

No? Then onward to the consent agenda!

Item 4, the Yellow Pages Ban was the only item to get much discussion: President Chiu talked up how his amendments should address the concerns everyone had when this was before the board last month. Campos complained that there wasn't enough outreach to multi-lingual businesses. Chiu rebutted that there was like... a ton of outreach, especially to multi-lingual businesses. And before we could in to a fight over which supervisor knows the most multi-lingual businesses owners, Mark Farrell's haircut and it's J.D. chimed in to remind us all that the city is probably going to get sued over this. Whatever, we all support it anyway. The Yellow Pages ban passed 10-1, with Sean Elsbernd dissenting because his district's population is mostly plumbers and electricians. +1 to David Chiu for making it happen, finally. And +0.5 to Mark Farrell for reminding us of the obvious without being annoying about it.

On Item 5, Avalos asked for more time. That's the second time in as many months he's stalled a vote mid-meeting while we wait for him to get some additional info. Do not approve! -1 for Avalos.

During roll call for introductions, David Campos slammed the format of Mayor Question Time because it didn't allow the supervisors to ask follow up questions. Where were you two months ago when we voted on this thing, Campos? You definitely should have backed up your boy Avalos back then, but we'll give you a +1 for finally figuring it out.

Speaking of which, Avalos also spoke out against the format of Question Time. We can't fault him since he's been saying that it sucks from the beginning, but maybe he should take the week to figure out how to amend the process so it doesn't suck so bad. That would be an easy way for someone currently at the bottom of the rankings to pick up some easy points. (HINT. HINT.)

Eric Mar invited everyone to ride bikes with him tomorrow, as part of Bike to Work day. (He's leaving from the Blue Danube Café at 8:45 a.m. - be there!) It was kind of sweet really, so +1 to Eric Mar.

Ross Mirkarimi was surprisingly quiet all meeting, but he did want to make sure he spoke up for the bar Martin Mack's on Haight Street when it came up in the discussion about assessing costs for blight and graffiti fines. Martin Mack's isn't a particularly special bar, so either Ross really digs their bloody marys or he's being hyper-attentive to his district. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt and toss him half a point for the Bloody Marys. +0.5 for Ross Mirkarimi

Finally, Jane Kim also responded to the Mayor's answer to her question during introductions, but for our purposes we were more amused when she got up to commend the HSA for their work during last week's fire at 1040 Folsom. Here's an incredibly blurry shot of a move reserved for group photo opportunities called "the sorority squat":

After question time and the question time redux that occurred during introductions, we didn't have a lot of energy left for all the people who stood up to comment on the Housing Elements Plan. Judging from the looks of them you can probably figure out they were not in favor of it:

At the end of the day, Ed Lee had the biggest delta. Gaining a record-setting five points for being so damned likable, but he's still got a lot of ground to make up and we're not even sure we remember why we put him all the way down there to begin with.

Final Ranking: (this week's points in parenthesis)
6.5 Ross Mirkarimi (+0.5)
6 Mark Farrell (+0.5)
5 Scott Wiener (No change)
4 Sean Elsbernd (No change)
3 Malia Cohen (No change)
3 David Campos (+1)
3 Jane Kim (+1)
2.5 Carmen Chu (No change)
1 David Chiu (+1)
-1 Eric Mar (+1)
-4 John Avalos (-1)
-999,999,994 Mayor Ed Lee (+5)