Urban Action 2012

ALTERNATIVES Increase Government Oversight The AWSS is maintained through yearly appropriations from San Francisco’s Capital Plan and various bond measures passed by voters. With the AWSS falling further into disrepair every day that passes, it is imperative for the safety of San Franciscans that the repairs that San Francisco has paid for are performed efficiently and quickly. The issue of financial oversight and governmental responsibility is a major reason why the system is still dilapidated today. Either through the diverting of public funds to other purposes or governmental officials negligence, the repairs promised in the past have still not taken place. “In 2010 a financial boondoggle was passed under the guise of Proposition B” (Personal Interview, 2011) Says former District 7 Supervisor Tony Hall. He has served for over 35 years as a city administrator and for five years as a publically elected individual at city hall. His experience seeing “governmental corruption” has been first hand. “What the government machine has been about is extracting money from its citizens. San Franciscans are some of the most generous people in America, with our city budget being larger then twenty-two states in America. Let me ask you; is our safety infrastructure in any better shape then it was five years ago? No its not.”

The bond measure that Hall was referring to was a measure passed in 2010 that let the city borrow $412.3 million in order to “pay for repairs and improvements that will allow San Francisco to more quickly respond to a major earthquake or other disaster” (ESERB 2010). Why Hall referred to it as a boondoggle is because of how the city is going to spend the money.

In the campaign to have to bond passed voters were showed images of burning buildings and told of the imminent threat of a massive earthquake, but what was not clearly expressed to voters was that only 6% of the bond would actually address the issues of the AWSS system. Hall points out how the purpose of the measure was to build a $243 million dollar “Public Safety Building” in Mission Bay, where it only spent 67 million on repairing the safety infrastructure of the AWSS (ESERB 2010). “This is just another example of how the city uses voters to fund pet projects and sweetheart deals. The Mission Bay Public Safety Building uses $243 million dollars of tax payers money to build an unnecessary building while the AWSS is no longer able to put out a fire.”Hall explains that government officials diverting funds or passing unnecessary bonds is nothing new, it has been happening since a similar 1989 earthquake bond was passed to respond to the infrastructure failures demonstrated in the Loma Pieta earthquake where only the problems in the Marina district were addressed.

The negligence of San Francisco’s government to properly maintain the AWS System will affect the city’s ability to respond to the next major seismic event in San Francisco. In order to spend the money on appropriate improvements in the system, city government needs to change the priority level and money they spend repairing the infrastructure. The first step in doing this is to institute in the Capital Plan a progressive improvement agenda that would deal with the highest level of priorities first, and then systematically rebuild the entire system. What this would mean is a massive investment in the AWSS that could cost as much as $20 million dollars for each one of the 135 miles of pipeline that runs underneath San Francisco, totaling $2.7 billion dollars. According to Tony Hall this would require a reorganization of govern 110 | Urban action 2012