In the lead-up to approving the dispensary, commissioners tried to ease the attendees’ concerns. They said the project fit into a local push to decriminalize the cannabis industry, and promised that city staff would work with the dispensary operator to make sure it followed all regulations.

But it’s unlikely that their message reached many of the people in the room, because they said it in English — most, maybe all, of the objecting residents were monolingual Chinese speakers. An interpreter, provided by the city, had interpreted only public comments from Chinese into English for the commission’s benefit.  

“While I appreciate that the commissioners asked many questions, most people there couldn’t understand what they were saying, what questions they were asking or why they approved the motion,” said Josephine Zhao, a community leader and president of the Chinese American Democratic Club, who had booked the interpreter. She had expected to receive English-to-Chinese interpretation too, clueless that she had failed to clear bureaucratic hurdles that she did not know existed.

San Francisco has “the strongest local language law in the nation” for providing translation services and interpretation during public meetings in order to make government widely accessible, according to the city Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs, which oversees those policies. Officials are proposing to strengthen the policies.

But those services often fall short and the forthcoming revisions to the policies are unlikely to change that. The people who need the services most, including immigrants, are generally unaware that they’re available or how to access them, some community groups say. Members of the public must request interpretation in advance but even then, the city might fail to provide it because of resource shortages. The result is a persistent communication gap between the people who make laws and many whom they affect.

“I’ve been at hearings numerous times when people who got up there and spoke in their native tongue, and there weren’t translators available,” said Roberto Hernandez, one of the founders of the Latino Task Force, which serves communities with prevalent Spanish and Maya speakers. 

Difficult request process

Proposed legislation by District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents the southeast neighborhoods, would make Vietnamese one of the languages that the city must use in signage and online content; the other languages are English, Spanish, Filipino and Chinese. His proposal would also make it easier for the public to file complaints when, for example, they did not receive the interpretation services they requested. 

Despite having a robust set of language-access policies, “not every single department is following it,” said Natalie Gee, Walton’s legislative aide. The supervisor’s proposal is largely intended to increase department accountability, she said.

But that proposal would not affect the system for requesting interpretation services, which can be a barrier for many. For example, requests must be made at least 48 hours before a public meeting.

“The time to request is challenging,” said Vanessa Bohm, director of family wellness and health promotion programs at the Central American Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps the Bay Area Latino community. The center is one of seven organizations that form the Language Access Network of San Francisco, which educates people about language policies and gives city departments feedback on their execution. 

To request interpretation, someone must know whom to call: Requests for meetings of the Board of Supervisors or its many committees should go to the clerk of the board, and booking for other public bodies requires finding and calling their dedicated contacts, often on department websites. Callers must provide a meeting’s name and date as well as the specific agenda item for which they’ll want interpretation, information that can also be found online if someone knows where to look. Bohm said making a request is complicated — even for someone who can read and speak fluent English, like her — and people with limited English proficiency probably have a harder time.

Hefty price of interpretation

When asked about the Planning Commission’s meeting on the proposed cannabis dispensary, Dan Sider, the Planning Department’s chief of staff, said Zhao had requested Chinese-to-English interpretation for only the public comment period. City personnel do not make assumptions about other services that requesters might need, Sider said. 

Zhao told the Public Press that she had expected to receive two-way interpretation, unaware that her request needed to spell that out.

Interpreting a meeting’s deliberations into the requester’s language generally costs more than interpreting public comments for lawmakers. The city pays an interpreter between $30 and $50 per 15 minutes of work. At the meeting, the interpreter speaks quietly into a device that transmits to headsets for the people who need the service. If the meeting exceeds one hour — and many do — two interpreters are needed because continuously speaking without a break can be exhausting.

By comparison, public comment periods generally last several minutes.

It would be ideal to provide meeting-long, two-way interpretation as the norm, Sider said. But “we have to operate with some very real resource constraints,” he said.

SF ‘not prioritizing immigrant community members’

Jose Ng would like to see it become the norm. Ng is an immigrant rights program manager at local nonprofit Chinese for Affirmative Action, and he manages the Language Access Network, of which his organization is a member.

“When you want community members to be able to fully participate in those meetings,” full, bi-directional interpretation is best, Ng said. But “we often hear that they don’t have enough staff” to provide that service, he added. 

One scenario that can arise is that a department cannot secure both of the interpreters who would be needed for longer meetings, said Jorge Rivas, the executive director of the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs.

In follow-up correspondence, the Public Press asked Walton’s office why his legislation did not attempt to fix these issues. Staff did not reply in time for publication.

City departments have a general culture of “not prioritizing immigrant community members’ language access needs enough,” Ng said.

The post Inadequate Language Services Leave Immigrants in the Dark at SF Public Meetings appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

When another man said a case worker told him the site offered walk-up beds, a shelter employee responded: “I don’t know why they do that. They send you in circles.”

More people toting backpacks and suitcases milled about on the sidewalk beyond the teal metal bars that separated them from a hot meal and bed for the night.

When Harley, who didn’t share his last name, got into a motorcycle accident and lost his job, he also lost stable housing. He said he called San Francisco’s Homeless Outreach Team’s voicemail three times that week asking for help getting into a shelter, but that his calls went unreturned.

Many elected officials, including Mayor London Breed, have said that large numbers of people experiencing homelessness are not interested in what resources the city has to offer, citing data from the Healthy Streets Operation Center.

But new records requested from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and interviews with housing providers show that it is difficult for people seeking shelter to obtain it due to a shortage of beds and other barriers they encounter trying to access city services.

From late January 2023 to early August 2023, people left messages in the Homeless Outreach Team’s voicemail system more than 2,000 times requesting shelter, and 68% of those requests were “unable to be fulfilled,” a Public Press investigation found. In most cases, this means that the city was unable to connect with the caller in person or on the phone — because there was not enough information to locate the person, the person did not respond to callbacks, the person’s voicemail box was full or the number was disconnected, or the dispatch team could not find them at a specified location. In few instances, the city was in contact with the person but did not have any shelter beds available to offer the caller.  

In that same time period, only 56 offers of shelter were rejected by those seeking shelter — a mere 2.7% — while the city provided shelter for 110 people who requested a bed. In 243 instances, city employees did not record an outcome. Another 240 requests were marked “not applicable,” for a variety of reasons: the request was not clear, the person no longer needed help, they did not live in San Francisco, or the call came from a concerned citizen or provider. There are not enough resources to respond to calls from people who are not experiencing homelessness themselves, city employees said.

Discussing how the city handles requests through the hotline’s voicemail — there is no option to speak to a live person — employees said that many people do not want the shelter options offered, and that connecting with callers is tricky because many of them do not have reliable access to phones or do not stay in one spot until city staffers arrive, sometimes days later.

Interviews with employees at five organizations that provide shelter and run coordinated entry sites that assess people for housing referrals were consistent: There is high shelter demand in San Francisco and often not enough supply.

“Providers working with the unhoused are pretty screwed right now,” said Colleen Murakami, Chief Development Officer at Swords to Plowshares, an organization that serves veterans. Housing veterans is challenging as there are no longer shelter beds set aside for veterans and treatment beds are scarce, forcing the organization to rely on private funds to get veterans off the street as they await permanent placements, she said.

Providers for families and transitional-aged youth also cited problems with lack of resources.

“We are assessing families from the moment our doors open to the moment they close,” said Hope Kamer, director of public policy and external affairs at Compass Family Services, a nonprofit that runs a coordinated entry access point for families. “It’s an unending tide of need.”

San Francisco is in the midst of a highly publicized lawsuit brought by several unhoused people and the Coalition on Homelessness against the city for failing to offer shelter during sweeps, not following its own encampment clearing policies, and seizing or destroying people’s possessions. Because the city does not have enough shelter beds for its unhoused population, plaintiffs argue that clearing tent and vehicle encampments without offering viable housing options is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

In December 2022, U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu issued a preliminary injunction preventing the city from citing, arresting or threatening people involuntarily experiencing homelessness to clear encampments. The lawsuit has sparked heated debates across the city, with the mayor, several members of the board of supervisors and Gov. Gavin Newsom decrying the action for limiting the city’s ability to address homelessness on its streets.

The definition of the term “involuntarily homeless” has become a key issue in the lawsuit.

Following clarification at a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals hearing, Breed announced on Sept. 25 that the city will resume sweeping encampments where people are “voluntarily homeless” — the term that the parties to lawsuit are using to describe those who refuse shelter or who are sleeping on the streets despite having a shelter bed elsewhere.

Lack of shelter beds

San Francisco last measured its unhoused population in August 2022, recording 7,754 people experiencing homelessness. However, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s website notes that the annual census is likely an undercount, estimating that San Francisco could have as many as 20,000 people who experience homelessness annually.

Elected officials acknowledge the shortage of shelter beds, with Breed’s most recent budget recommending the addition of nearly 600 beds, and at least one supervisor, Rafael Mandelman, requesting even more. Breed’s proposed additions would bring the total number of temporary beds available to about 3,700, which would accommodate less than half of the unhoused people tracked in the 2022 homelessness count.

On the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s shelter dashboard, occupancy usually hovers around 90%, though written explanations from the department note that figures are not a true reflection of the city’s capacity at a given moment. Many beds are reserved for certain programs or teams carrying out daily operations, and thus may remain vacant.

“They love showing vacant beds,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “Because for political reasons, it feeds into the mythology that they’re always trying to create that homeless people are there by choice.”

Friedenbach said that before the pandemic, the city had a one-night system through which adults could wait in line at drop-in centers around the city to try to secure a vacant bed at one of several shelters for the night. Today, the city offers only one walk-up shelter for adults, and spots there are hard to come by.

For families and pregnant people seeking shelter, the city has been piloting emergency hotel vouchers in partnership with Compass Family Services. But Kamer estimated there were still about 60 families in the family shelter queue as of late August.

Youth homelessness in San Francisco has decreased over the past 10 years as housing investments for young people increased, but “we still don’t have sufficient resources across for all of the young people that are experiencing homelessness on any given night, or throughout the year,” said Sherilyn Adams, executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services.

The gap in services is particularly pronounced for people between ages 18 and 24, said Katie Reisinger, director of health and safety at Huckleberry Youth Programs. While it is rare for both of the city’s two shelters for adolescents between 12 and 17 to be at capacity, there is almost no housing for 18-year-olds who age out of those programs, Reisinger said.

Missed connections and other barriers

The Department of Homelessness offered several explanations as to why so many voicemail requests were unable to be completed. Requests must come from people in San Francisco — if they say they are calling from another city, the department will not respond to their request for help. In many cases, people seeking help do not have their own phones and they use a stranger’s, so callbacks from the outreach team go unreturned. In other cases, those who call don’t leave adequate descriptions of their location or themselves, or when the Homeless Outreach Team shows up to a specified location, the caller is no longer there.

The team will attempt to locate an individual three times before stopping the search, said Brenda Meskan, an operations coordinator with the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team.

There are a variety of other pathways people can use to seek temporary shelter in San Francisco, and for many of them, having regular access to a phone or the internet is often key to the process, which relies on people signing up for online waitlists, contacting various nonprofits or making appointments at one of the city’s coordinated entry access points.

Many people turn to the Department of Homeless and Supportive Housing’s website for information about how to access shelter. Deborah Bouck, a communications manager for the department, said updating the website is a priority because people seeking shelter rely so heavily on it. However, in at least two recent instances, information on the site regarding coordinated entry access points was listed incorrectly. It was updated in early September following inquiries from the Public Press regarding discrepancies between the website and information provided by nonprofits running access points.

Bouck said that providers are responsible for notifying the department about changes in their hours or access procedures so the site can be updated, and that the department meets with groups every two weeks, providing regular opportunities for conveying new information.

Service providers noted other challenges that make it difficult to help certain growing populations, such as transitional-aged youth who have children, placing them on the family track, which isn’t designed to cater to young people. Kamer also pointed to families with children who are too young to be in school, preventing them from qualifying for otherwise appropriate shelters, such as the Buena Vista Horace Mann Stay-Over Program.

New shelter waitlist

In recent months, advocates criticized the hotline as an ineffective way to connect people with shelter sites and pushed for a return to the online waitlist that the city had in place before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The city listened. On July 5, San Francisco launched the new waitlist. In just over five weeks, almost 700 people had signed up, but 121 did not respond when they were offered beds, meaning their names were later removed from the list. The city reported 19 request cancellations. As of Sept. 20, there were 484 people waiting for spots to open up, while the city had placed 113 people.

“Since the pandemic, we have been striving to streamline access to shelter, while also ensuring those living on our streets access the care and services they need,” Denny Machuca-Grebe, a former spokesperson for the department, wrote in an August email when he was still working for the department.

Advocates say that the new waitlist is an improvement, but note that the options available are more limited compared with those available via the pre-pandemic waitlist. Current options are limited to congregate living — with many people who don’t know each other sleeping in the same room — which is not a viable option for everyone experiencing homelessness, especially those who have post-traumatic stress disorder, experiences with severe trauma and other disabilities. Congregate shelters for adults can also feel unsafe to transitional aged-youth, said Adams of Larkin Youth Services. The city’s Frequently Asked Question site for the waitlist notes that only individuals who can get in and out of a bunk bed unassisted should register for the waitlist.

Other requests for help

Will McKennett, a brain cancer survivor and employee at the San Francisco Zoo with a passion for reptiles, knows the difficulty of finding shelter. In late August, McKennett said he had shown up at the Dolores Shelter Program hoping to find housing on several nights with no luck.

“It’s tough,” said McKennett, who has been homeless since last year when he was evicted for smoking too close to doors and windows. He was recently cut off from social security benefits after the administration discovered it was mistakenly overpaying him and demanded that he repay $14,000. “But why is that my fault?” he asked.

Though the Homeless Outreach Team was able to help him secure a spot in a navigation center, McKennett was kicked out for reasons he did not share. The congregate shelter was not ideal for him, as many other people in the center were using drugs in the bathroom or didn’t take the coronavirus pandemic seriously, he said.

Without a shelter bed, McKennett sleeps outside or in a chair at the United Council of Human Services between paychecks. Once the money comes in, he spends $300 on a hotel each week until his funds run out, he said.

While requests for shelter comprise the majority of calls to the Homeless Outreach Team’s hotline, nearly one-tenth of callers were interested in speaking directly with a member of the team (in person or on the phone), and another tenth simply wanted information.

Of the 3,584 calls to the team from late January to early August, data shows that the city returned 364 requests for outreach, assessed 105 people for coordinated entry, and gave 522 people referrals for case management or shared other information, such as details about the city’s housing and shelter programs.

“We consider any connection with clients to be a success,” Machuca-Grebe wrote in response to questions regarding how the city measures the hotline’s success in connecting individuals to shelter.

McKennett said that in his experience, the Homeless Outreach Team is great about bringing blankets to people on the street. In the meantime, he was still searching for a permanent place to call home.

Correction, Sept. 29: This post was edited to update a quote attributed to Swords to Plowshares about shelter availability that the organization said was missing context.

The post Missed Connections: SF Shelter Hotline Staff Could Not Reach Most People Who Called for Help appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Dorsey told the San Francisco Public Press that he reversed his previous support for the centers — called wellness hubs — once the city’s plans narrowed to one site from six, and removed safe consumption sites, which would have allowed people to consume drugs under supervision so they could receive immediate help in case of overdose.

Dorsey said he now wants the funds to go toward jail health services, including forcing treatment for people in jail who are struggling with substance abuse disorder.

“I think there’s a way to make custodial and coercive interventions lifesaving interventions,” Dorsey said.

Police began jailing people who openly used drugs or appeared intoxicated in May under an initiative called the Intoxication Detention Pilot Program. The goal of the intervention, officials said, was to get people with substance abuse disorder into treatment. According to the latest numbers by the city program organizers, none of the 191 people jailed for drug use as of July 23 had entered treatment. Dorsey believes they should no longer have the option to refuse treatment.

“In the research that I’ve done on cities that have had successful interventions around open air drug scenes, there are coercive interventions that are a part of that,” he said.

Harm reduction advocates say the strategy of jailing and coercing people into treatment is dangerous. Studies have shown that the risk of overdose death among people who use drugs is dramatically increased after they’re released from incarceration.

Last week, the city medical examiner’s office released grim data showing that 71 people died of overdose in July for a total of 473 this year. That puts San Francisco on track to surpass its highest recorded number of annual overdose deaths — 725 in 2020.

Dorsey said the increased risk that an inmate fatally overdoses after being released from incarceration is a convincing reason in support of redirecting funds from wellness hubs to jail health.

“What is particularly true given the opioid use disorder — tolerance can diminish, and then if there’s a return to use, it can be more dangerous,” Dorsey told the Public Press. “So, if there are services or interventions we can have around that, it feels to me like that would be priority number one.”

Sarah Evans, global director of harm reduction at the Open Society Foundations, rejected the notion that arresting people solely for drug use would benefit their lives.

“Come on, going to jail is not the answer, right?” she said. “I’m sure that it’s possible to find people who will say ‘I went to jail, and it changed my life.’ I know people who will say that, and I respect those people for changing their lives. But by and large, we also know that that is not the experience of people. Going to jail is a setback in a person’s life. It’s not a step up.”

Evans said investments should instead be made in housing where people can get support even while continuing to struggle with substance use disorders and mental health issues.

Health experts in San Francisco have said that the city should prioritize treatment options for those who want it over those who don’t. Kelly Knight, professor at UCSF and associate director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, said that San Francisco should work on getting enough beds to meet existing demand.

“I don’t ever want to have the conversation about involuntary versus voluntary choices until we have the conversation about the gap in the services that are needed for people,” Knight said.

Dorsey said coercive treatment has succeeded in certain European settings, like Sweden and the Netherlands. While coercion exists in both countries, they differ significantly in their approach toward addiction. The Netherlands mandates treatment in penal settings using a harm reduction approach that focuses on the health of the drug user. In Sweden, coerced treatment is delivered through social services mandates — similar to U.S. conservatorship laws for people with serious mental health disorders. The Swedish abstinence-only approach focuses on the health of society, heavily stigmatizes drug use and asserts that all non-medical use of narcotics is abuse.

Today, the prevalence of drug use in the Netherlands is slightly above the European average, while the number of drug-related deaths remains low. The Dutch population with substance use disorder is declining, as fewer young people are becoming addicted, according to a report published by the Brookings Institute.

Sweden launched coerced treatment in 1982. By the 1990s, the cost of both voluntary and coercive treatment in Sweden became overly burdensome, according to a United Nations report from the Office of Drugs and Crime. So, priority was given to people who were willing to undergo treatment. By 2005, only 6% of substance abusers in residential treatment were in coercive care. Today, Sweden has low rates for drug use while the number of drug-related deaths is more than three times the European average, according to the Brookings Institute report.

This article is part of a series on San Francisco’s overdose crisis and prevention efforts, underwritten by a California Health Equity Fellowship grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

The post Supervisor Defends Dropping Support for Addiction-Treatment Centers appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

A lawsuit against San Francisco Superior Court over its routine failure to uphold defendants’ right to a speedy trial is in the hands of California’s Supreme Court.

San Francisco has more than 1,100 cases past statutory time limits, and 115 of those defendants are languishing in jail without a conviction.

At a rally on the steps of the Hall of Justice last week, concerned residents and staffers with the Public Defender’s Office gathered to denounce what they view as San Francisco Superior Court’s routine breach of criminal defendants’ constitutional rights.

San Francisco resident Christine Sipra said during the protest that when she saw media reports about defendants sitting in jail for years awaiting trial, she was compelled to join the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office rally.

“Who’s being affected? Our community members, our neighbors — and it does not escape me that any one of us can be affected by this,” Sipra said. “This could be our friends, our families. This could be something that might affect me in my life dramatically. People are losing their homes, their jobs, pets — all kinds of circumstances are being affected by people that are being held without the basic human right of a speedy trial.”

In September 2021, San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju and four others — including two mothers of adult children whose speedy trial rights were violated — filed a taxpayers’ lawsuit to compel San Francisco Superior Court to address the backlog, which began when COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders suspended court proceedings in March 2020.

They demanded that the court abide by California statutes requiring that priority be given to criminal trials over civil cases, and to cases where the accused is incarcerated pre-trial. It also stipulated that the court follow procedural steps before extending criminal trials beyond time limits.

Raju’s lawsuit went to Contra Costa County Superior Court, and in December 2021, Judge Edward Weil ruled that his court did not have the authority to compel the San Francisco court to act. He said relief must be sought in the Court of Appeal instead. 

Raju filed a notice of appeal with the California Court of Appeal in March 2022 and filed his opening brief in July that year. In January 2023, San Francisco Superior Court filed a response and oral arguments were heard in April. On June 8, the First District Court of Appeal reinstated the suit and ruled that Raju and his fellow petitioners can seek court orders to reserve more courtrooms for criminal trials.

This week, San Francisco Superior Court filed a petition for review from the California Supreme Court arguing that permitting lawsuits that challenge court administration would have “profound” adverse consequences.

“The final destination of the Court of Appeal’s ruling is chaos,” states the court’s petition. “If the presiding judge and the judge assigned to the taxpayer action gave conflicting orders about opening courtrooms, security, and staffing, nobody would know which orders to follow.”

The petition stated that the First District Court of Appeal was wrong when it claimed that the civil code authorizes taxpayers’ lawsuits against state officials.

“It does not,” states the court’s petition. “The statute authorizes actions against officers or agents of a ‘local agency.’ A ‘local agency’ is ‘a city, town, county, or city and county, or a district, public authority, or any other political subdivision in the state.’”

The court’s petition argued that the case Taking Offense v. State of California, which is making its way through the courts, will determine whether California recognizes taxpayer standing to bring actions against state officials, and that ruling could eliminate or significantly change the basis and requirements for this lawsuit.

Deputy Public Defender Sujung Kim said Aug. 4 that the California Supreme Court has sanctioned multiple cases in the last 50 years that allowed taxpayers to bring lawsuits against state officials.

She added that disallowing taxpayer lawsuits against state officials would lead to unchecked powers for the court.

“If we buy into what the court is saying, that means that courts are above the law, that their actions cannot be scrutinized even if they’re violating state law or doing something that’s illegal,” Kim said. “It goes against public policy to say that courts are above the law.”

The Public Defender’s Office intends to file a response Monday to the Superior Court’s petition for review to the State Supreme Court.

At the rally on the steps of the Hall of Justice on July 28, Raju said the court is starting to catch up on felony case backlogs, but misdemeanor cases remain postponed while civil cases take priority.

“Last week, there was only one misdemeanor trial courtroom open,” Raju said. “These cases are causing huge distractions in people’s lives, their work and their home lives, taking off work for court hearings, dealing with electronic monitoring that’s limiting people’s movements and their ability to support themselves with no trial or resolution in sight.”

Last week’s rally was the public defender staff’s eighth and final weekly summer sit-in protesting long delays in criminal trials. It was the latest action in a years-long campaign to bring awareness to the trial backlog.

In a rally last September, defendants like Robert Brewer, 31, talked about the profound impact trial delays had on their lives. Brewer said he used to be a social butterfly, but since being release from a 288-day incarceration awaiting trial in San Francisco County Jail, he’s a changed man.

“There’s just a black cloud hanging over me,” Brewer said. “You’re treated like you’re guilty until you’re proven innocent. I lost my brother — my best friend. I wasn’t able to walk him out of this world.”

Right to a speedy trial

Receiving a speedy trial is a fundamental right guaranteed by both the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the California Constitution. According to federal and state law, if a defendant isn’t brought to trial within 60 days of arraignment for a felony or 30 days of arraignment for a misdemeanor, the case would be dismissed.  

Long case delays can lead to undue anxiety for defendants, oppressive pretrial incarceration, faded memories among witnesses and the potential for lost evidence.

Certain time limit concessions are allowed, however. To keep a defendant in jail past mandatory limits, four legal requirements must be met: 1) there is enough evidence for a guilty verdict; 2) the defendant would harm others if released; 3) less restrictive measures are not an option; 4) and the judge must explain the decision for the record.

There are legal exceptions called “good cause,” which could include a defendant’s request to extend the trial, a defendant failing to appear for a hearing, a defendant having no legal representation at trial, the defendant becoming incapacitated and unable to defend themselves, or the case being too complex to process within time limits, for example in the case of multiple defendants.

The law allows for discretion over statutory time limits under “exceptional circumstances,” including matters of public health. In March 2020, COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders led Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, chairperson of the Judicial Council of California, to shut down courts and extend the time limits on jury trials by 90 days.

The San Francisco Superior Court reopened all courtrooms on June 18, 2021. The Chief Justice’s orders were rescinded on June 30, 2022.

In December 2021, San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen called a hearing on the case pileup. Afterward, two civil courtrooms were opened for out-of-custody criminal trials. But the backlog only increased.

The lawsuit filed by Raju in September 2021 states that pre-pandemic, the court would hold up to 150 misdemeanor trials annually, but since misdemeanor trials resumed in 2021, the court is averaging only 15 misdemeanor trials per year.

Earlier this year, the Public Defender’s Office filed Estrada v. Superior Court seeking to dismiss a criminal case for violating speedy trial rights. The lawsuit argued that the courts abused their discretion in claiming exceptional circumstances in violation of a defendant’s speedy trial rights. They argued that delays are not due to the pandemic, but rather to chronic court mismanagement, including unused courtrooms, excessive judicial vacations and failure to hold trials at the Civic Center courthouse.

In March 2023, the Court of Appeal supported the court. The appeals decision said the backlog resulted from court closures and later disruptions from COVID-19 case surges and new variants, and that the backlog could not reasonably be expected to dissipate within months or even a year or two, particularly given that new criminal cases keep being filed.

The San Francisco Superior Court referred to this decision in its filing with the State Supreme Court to argue that “a criminal defendant’s speedy-trial rights do not impose mandatory duties on courts to allocate resources, open courtrooms, hire staff, or upgrade security.”

Some civil rights groups have requested that the Estrada v. Superior Court decision be unpublished to avoid setting a dangerous precedent undermining the right to a speedy trial. In a written appeal, an organization based in Washington, D.C. called the Civil Rights Corps argued that weakening the right to a speedy trial makes “the plea bargain system impermissibly coercive, increasing prosecutors’ leverage in plea negotiations against people, both jailed and free, who await trial indefinitely. Deprived of their lone bargaining chip, the right to reject the offer and demand a speedy trial, the accused will end up begging rather than negotiating.”

The backlog

It is unclear how many criminal cases were left unresolved in San Francisco Superior Court last year. The court provided data for the California Judicial Council’s 2023 court statistics report stating that 35,265 criminal cases were filed — 3,086 felonies, 2,179 misdemeanors, and the rest mainly traffic-related infractions. It showed that civil filings totaled 12,004 cases with 10,433 resolved. But San Francisco was one of 10 counties that did not disclose the outcomes of criminal cases.

San Francisco also failed to provide its criminal case processing time. The 48 counties that did report their data showed that an average of 45% of felony cases and 43% of misdemeanors cases were resolved in less than 90 days.

Several Bay Area counties made accommodations to whittle down their trial backlog. Contra Costa County cut its trial backlog in half by March 2022. And other counties used alternative venues for pretrial proceedings like jury assembly, including the San Mateo County Event Center and the Sonoma County Event Center at the Fairgrounds. That freed up county courtrooms for trials. San Francisco has made no such effort.

Courts outside the Bay Area also found ways to deal with unwieldy backlogs. Riverside County contended with its roughly 2,800 backlogged cases by bringing civil judges onto criminal trials.

San Francisco has 57 judicial officers — judges and others with the power to facilitate, arbitrate, preside over and make decisions on cases — for a population of 815,201. That’s just under seven judicial officers per 100,000 residents compared with a statewide average of 11.4 per 100,000 residents. Yet additional judges have not been brought in to help alleviate the workload, according to the public defender’s office — for example, by temporarily bringing civil judges onto criminal trials as was done in Riverside County.

According to Raju, the judges’ explanations for the backlog have recently shifted.

“Judges in the building are no longer reading a canned script that blames COVID for delays. And felony trials are moving forward faster by all indications,” Raju said. “But I’m also here to say that this situation is by no means over, and our work is not done.”

Meanwhile, the judges who are presiding over cases are taking vacations, but the courts aren’t finding substitutes to handle some of the caseload while they’re away — and that’s taking a huge toll, according to an analysis by Deputy Public Defender Oliver Kroll.

Kroll filed a petition in Estrada v. Superior Court. His analysis of the court’s vacancies during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that between July 2021 and May 2022, courtrooms were empty 56% of the time. And from April to August 2022, 59% of the vacancies were due to judges’ vacations.

During a protest in front of the Civic Center courthouse on July 21, Deputy Public Defender Sujung Kim said people have a right to take vacations but, “the court has an obligation to find coverage for these judges when they’re on vacation.”

“A government agency like the court serves the people, that is their job, they’re public servants. And so, they have a duty to make sure that the courts are fully staffed and they’re not doing it,” Kim said.

In March 2022, the court gave an explanation for why trials were being delayed in response to Hernandez-Valenzuela v. Superior Court, which sought a dismissal for a criminal case for violating speedy trial rights.

The court stated that delays were happening because the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office was overextended at the jails and the Hall of Justice, that security at the Civic Center courthouse was inadequate for criminal trials other than nonviolent misdemeanors, and there were not enough bailiffs to cover each courtroom.

In an emailed response, the Sheriff’s Office stated that the court is using two courtrooms at the Civic Center courthouse and “is going to be using” the Criminal Justice Center for out-of-custody felony trials.

“These two locations lack some of the security features that make the Hall of Justice a safer place for those trials,” the email stated. “The Sheriff’s Office, as always, is collaborating with the Court to address security concerns related to the change of use of the Criminal Justice Center and the increased number of criminal cases being assigned in the Civic Center Court.”

Kim said she is dubious that security concerns were the main issue because the Civic Center Courthouse was used for felony trials for many years.

“When they ran out of space at the Hall of Justice, there were too many cases, they had to open up some of these courtrooms,” Kim said in an interview. “They tried murder cases, sexual, all kinds of cases. But now, the courts excuse for why they can’t try criminal cases here at this courthouse is because of, quote unquote, security reasons. We have probed and asked, and they have never given us any more details about what exactly the security concerns are. We’re very skeptical that that is the true reason.”

Kroll said in an interview that justice is being denied because the absence of trial deadlines without clear reasons gives the district attorney’s office no motivation to settle a case. And a defendant’s desperation may compel them to agree to a prosecutor’s terms regardless of guilt or innocence.

“Coercive plea bargaining is the leading cause of wrongful conviction,” Kroll said. “And then the conviction haunts you for the rest of your life, like a scarlet letter.”

During a protest in front of the Civic Center courthouse, Deputy Public Defender Zach Waterman from the Misdemeanor Unit explained why defendants in misdemeanor cases are especially vulnerable to wrongful convictions.

“Evidence in misdemeanors — there’s none of that. Not until you get to a trial,” Waterman said. “In a felony, you have a preliminary hearing, they have to put officers on the stand, they’ll tell you what happened, and you get to cross examine them. In a misdemeanor, there is no hearing. You’re presumed guilty. That’s what this court does every single day, in every single case, until you fight all the way to the moment of your trial.”

The harm

Kroll’s petition in Estrada v. Superior Court includes several declarations by defendants who described their ordeal:

“Alexandra Andrews, who is detained pretrial in County Jail 2 in San Francisco, writes that she was subjected to weeks-long lockdowns where she was not allowed out of her cell at all. She has not been able to contact her family because she was not given a working phone pin number. She writes: ‘It feels like my mental stability is continuing to degrade . . . I feel like I’m dealing with everything on my own.’”

Another declaration states:

“Felipe Preciado, who is detained pretrial in County Jail 3 in San Bruno, writes that he is often confined in a small, dirty, poorly ventilated cell with another inmate for the entire day, without even time out of the cell to shower. He writes: ‘Being here has completely changed me . . . I’m filled with despair.’”

Despite the conditions in county jail, the stress of looming trials can lead defendants to choose jail hoping for a faster resolution that would free them from strict restrictions, according to the public defender’s office.

Charles Underwood, who is unhoused and legally blind, was charged with misdemeanor assault and battery and requested pretrial jail hoping to expedite his case. Nevertheless, his case was delayed four months. In June, a jury acquitted him after two hours of deliberation.

Brewer, who spent 288 in jail before his trial, was also found not guilty by a San Francisco Superior Court jury. He had been charged with murder for the Aug. 19, 2020 shooting in the Tenderloin of 44-year-old Contra Costa County resident Darrelle Scales. Brewer said he shot Scales in self-defense after approaching Scales’ car, believing it to be his own rental car. A dispute ensued and Brewer walked away, but Scales followed while reaching for a shiny object in his waistband. Brewer retaliated by shooting. The object turned out to be a metal pipe.

Sarina Borg, 45, was also acquitted after more than two years in jail. During the September 2022 public defender rally, her mother, Myra Borg, talked about the impact of her daughter’s years-long incarceration without a conviction.

“As a result of the horrible conditions in jail and being misdiagnosed for nearly two years, my daughter is now ill with a very serious condition that has resulted in her lungs collapsing and is spreading to other organs in her body,” Borg said. “Her doctors at San Francisco General prescribed medicine and treatment, but when she returns to jail, it takes weeks for her to receive her prescribed medication and treatment.

“I keep praying that this nightmare will end, and my daughter will come home to me and her children so we can begin to heal together.”

It would take yet another 2 months for her daughter to be released. In May 2020, Sarina Borg was accused of aiding and abetting a February 2020 homicide. Her case finally went to trial in October 2022, and in early November, a judge decided there wasn’t enough evidence to show that Borg knew about the alleged murderer’s intentions. The judge granted a motion for acquittal before the case could go to the jury. 

The situation in San Francisco County jails is only expected to get worse as city, county and state law enforcement agencies increase the rate of arrests following their May announcement of a new measure to crack down on drug dealers and unhoused people appearing intoxicated on city streets. By July 23, those agencies had logged 502 arrests collectively for drug sales in San Francisco, compared with 566 such arrests in all of 2022.

That’s what brought Dara Dadachanji, a software engineer who lives in the Tenderloin, to the July 21 public defender’s protest at the Civic Center courthouse. He said he’s rattled by what he views as unfair treatment of people experiencing homelessness in his neighborhood.

“People are just waiting in jail for loitering and doing a lot of things where, like, 90% of these cases are gonna get dismissed,” Dadachanji said. “The situation is really bad and a lot of the reason it’s bad is because we sweep people from other areas of the city into the Tenderloin and they’re treating it as a containment zone. But we need to house these people, we need to give them housing, shelter, food and access to resources to get back on their feet. We can’t just arrest them and hope that that’s going to make things go away.”

Both the police crackdown and the trial backlog are taking a disproportionately hard toll on the city’s minority communities. The Sheriff’s Office told the San Francisco Chronicle that of the 58 people arrested for breaking public intoxication or drug possession laws in the first week of the program, 25 were Latinos, 23 white, nine Black and one American Indian. And while about 5.6% of San Francisco residents are Black, more than half the people in San Francisco’s jails whose speedy trial deadlines have passed are Black, according to Raju.

Deputy Public Defender Jacque Wilson said during last Friday’s rally that he felt the injustice personally because he had two brothers who were in prison during the pandemic.

“There’s nothing like trying to hug on a loved one from a jail cell,” Wilson said. “Somewhere, I read that the greatness of America was about the right to a speedy jury trial. Somewhere I read about the greatness of America was the right to go to trial, and the presumption of innocence. All of that is being ignored here in San Francisco.”

Story update

On Aug. 7, Raju and his co-plaintiffs filed a response to the Superior Court’s petition for review.

The Superior Court had stated in its petition that if taxpayers could bring actions against state officials, that would “allow lawsuits that any of millions of taxpayers may initiate with a single, unverified complaint to burden courts and judges with collateral litigation about litigation, thus causing delay and wasting resources.”

Raju’s written response refuted this prediction.

“Their fears are groundless,” states the filing. “Taxpayer actions are a limited tool to address the rare situations — like this one — in which an unlawful court policy violates a mandatory duty that the law already imposes on courts.”

Raju’s filing called the prospect of millions of taxpayers overwhelming trial courts “fanciful” since the California Supreme Court has sanctioned multiple taxpayer lawsuits against state officials over many decades.

“The floodgates have been open for more than forty years. But there has been no flood of taxpayer litigation,” states the filing. “That is likely because most courts are careful to comply with their legal obligations, most taxpayers have no interest in launching costly and time-consuming lawsuits against government bodies, and the unavailability of money damages eliminates the main incentive for nuisance suits.”

San Francisco Superior Court had conceded that it was subject to taxpayer actions during arguments before the Court of Appeal, which ruled that this argument was “frankly specious.”

Nevertheless, the Superior Court argued in its petition for review that the matter is not settled law, and that a case making its way through the courts will determine whether California recognizes taxpayer standing to bring actions against state officials with a ruling that could eliminate or significantly change the basis for this lawsuit.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Deputy Public Defender Jacque Wilson had two brothers in San Francisco County Jail. In fact, they were in prison during the coronavirus pandemic. An earlier version of this story reported that a public defender rally occurred in September 2021. It occurred in September 2022.

The post State Supreme Court to Weigh In on Long Trial Delays appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

After dozens of meetings over two years, the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee  released its final recommendations to the Board of Supervisors and Mayor London Breed on Friday.

Beyond policy ideas in a December 2022 draft report such as $5 million cash payments to qualifying Black San Franciscans, the committee added dozens of new recommendations such as the creation of a “Black card” program offering free access to city services and discounts at businesses. The proposal would also further shake up politics, adding two Board of Supervisors appointees to the Police Commission, including someone who has been incarcerated.

The final plan altered qualifications for reparations programs. For example, now participants have only to prove one “harm” to be eligible.

But the “what” of the recommendations did not change as much as the “why.” The authors added much detail to their analysis, expanding discussion of injustices committed by government and private actors against Black San Franciscans, growing the report from a 60-page draft to almost 400 pages.

It takes pains to point out a precedent for local reparations: compensation by federal and San Francisco governments for Japanese Americans imprisoned during World War II. The movement for Black reparations gained momentum in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by Minneapolis police in May 2020, and was accelerated by racial disparities in the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. In San Francisco, reparations advocates, such as the local NAACP branch, had long denounced discrimination in housing, economic opportunity, disparities in health outcomes for Black residents. They also pointed to disparities in education outcomes — a greater challenge now than before the Supreme Court signaled a further curtailment of affirmative action nationwide.

“The court’s ruling,” observed James Lance Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of San Francisco who sits on the Reparations Advisory Committee, “said ‘No, we want to go back to old America.’ And reparations is saying, ‘We don’t want to be broken anymore as a people, we want to go into the rest of the 21st century somewhat whole.”

The committee’s draft plan drew national attention by advocating for the $5 million payments, as well as other policies such as selling public housing units for $1 each, establishing a historically Black college or university campus in the city, building neighborhood health clinics in African American neighborhoods and supporting Black cultural institutions. These provisions remain in the final version.

The Board of Supervisors plans to hold a public meeting on Sept. 19 to discuss the final plan’s ideas, including presentations from several reparations committee members.

Though critics question the need for reparations in a city where slavery was not formally adopted, the report notes: “The tenets of segregation, white supremacy, separatism, and the systematic repression and exclusion of Black people from the city’s economy were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement. The legacies of these actions bear true to this day.”

The local report comes on the heels of a parallel effort in Sacramento. The California State Reparations Task Force on June 29 submitted its findings for consideration by the Legislature. Recommendations include a formal apology for “gross” human rights violations against enslaved African people and their descendants, cash payments, restoring voting rights to formerly incarcerated people, tax relief for Black families in neighborhoods where the government participated in discriminatory lending, a K-12 Black curriculum, and eliminating toxic waste near federally assisted housing and other areas with high concentrations of African Americans.

Committing Resources

On June 29, several San Francisco supervisors reached an agreement with Breed to include $4 million in the city’s two-year budget for an Office of Reparations. That sum was a far cry from the $50 million that Supervisor Shamann Walton, who proposed the reparations committee, advocated in March.

Walton told the San Francisco Examiner he was “definitely disappointed we didn’t get $50 million, definitely disappointed we didn’t get $10 million, but most certainly positive and optimistic that we’re moving forward and there will be a positive outcome.”

Taylor said $4 million was “not a small amount of money” and expressed guarded optimism that reparations would move forward with an office. “I’m encouraged because of recent developments, but we’re still up against the tide and have a long way to go and a lot of people to, you know, to meet and persuade,” he said.

A June 5 San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst report estimated that the office would require $1.6 million over two years for administration. The office could use remaining funds to search for eligible applicants, develop policy proposals, create pilot programs and set investment criteria. But more funds would be needed for bigger goals, such as cash payments.

Though the funds have been secured, Breed “has not agreed” to allow her administration to spend the money, mayoral spokesperson Jeff Cretan told the San Francisco Chronicle.

In an email to the Public Press, the mayor’s office wrote that Breed believes reparations, including cash payments, is an issue best handled on the national level. However, “we are always interested in reforming local policies to address systemic issues that impact our communities, including the African-American community,” her office wrote. “We will be reviewing the report to understand what is included, and will work to implement policies and programs that deliver on that commitment.”

The full board must vote twice to finalize the budget before Breed signs it by August. The board unanimously endorsed the draft reparations plan in March in a nonbinding vote, but its recommendations can still be amended or set aside.

Question of Eligibility

To qualify for reparations, applicants must meet criteria the board recently amended in part to align with language in the California State Reparations Task Force’s report. Participants must be either African American descendants of an enslaved person, descendants of a free Black person prior to the 20th century, or have identified as Black or African American on public documents for 10 years. They must also be over 18 and have been born in or migrated to San Francisco before 2006, with 10 years of residency.

The plan requires participants to have suffered harm, and several examples were added to the list and others clarified. Additions include documented injury by law enforcement, lending discrimination and substandard living conditions in public or subsidized housing. Instead of proving two harms as in the draft plan, participants now need prove only one.

Additional Policies and Findings

Four subcommittees of the Reparations Advisory Committee added dozens of new recommendations in the past six months, as well as historical discussion and contemporary study findings.

Policy additions include a Black legal defense fund to help city workers facing discrimination, a genealogy testing fund and housing opportunities for Black seniors and LGBTQ+ people. Another suggestion: using money from cannabis taxes and restitution from drug-related class action lawsuits to fund Black businesses, education and homeownership.

The final report cites findings by several academic and governmental groups. A Law and Policy Lab report from Stanford Law School details disinvestment in San Francisco’s African American community between 1970 and 2022. An independent reviewer from Stanford University documented barriers in the city’s recruiting, hiring and advancement of Black workers.

Also included are a community-led oral history guide from students at Stanford Law School, findings from interviews and focus groups by students at the University of San Francisco and a socio-spatial analysis of Black San Francisco and a survey analysis by Kerby Lynch, senior program manager for Ceres Policy Research, a policy-oriented research group focused on alternatives to the current justice system.

The report acknowledges that the movement will need backing from the community and elected officials. State residents “express significant support for reparations measures for eligible Black Californians,” though it varies by characteristics like race and age, according to a study from the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. The survey shows that 87% Black Californians support cash payments, while only 47% of white people and 46% of Asian Americans do. Overall, cash payments attracted the least support — 63% — of any of the provisions surveyed.

But advocates note that many ideas once considered radical have come to fruition. “Momentum is in our favor,” Taylor said. “I’m most proud that we have inspired people to believe that this is theirs, that they deserve it. It is not welfare, it is not affirmative action, it is not Black begging. It is the result of actual harm that the state did to them as a population.”

The post New Reparations Ideas Include Senior Housing, Legal Assistance and a ‘Black Card’ for Local Discounts appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The California Public Utilities Commission did not even consistently collect the most basic industry information, such as ride requests and miles driven, the report from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority shows.

The state’s spotty information about company operations makes it more difficult for policy makers, especially at the local level, to address top priorities like road safety, air quality and access to transportation for people with disabilities, the study says.

Cities bear the brunt of congestion and other industry side effects — particularly San Francisco, which had by far the greatest ride concentration of any municipality in the state, with more than 820,000 trips per square mile in the year ending Aug. 30, 2020. But they have little jurisdiction over the ride-hailing giants, which are regulated by the state.

“The lack of accurate, timely and transparent data has left localities without necessary information to support a basic understanding” of ride-hailing company operations within their borders, the study said. 

According to the report, the commission let Uber and Lyft submit inconsistent and incomplete data in their mandatory annual reports to the agency.  

The problems are exacerbated “if not directly caused by” the commission’s unclear reporting requirements and “lack of quality assurance or enforcement of quality standards,” it said.

On Tuesday, Joe Castiglione, deputy director for technology, data and analysis at the Transportation Authority, presented the study to its board.

“TNC 2020: A Profile of Ride-Hailing in California,” is the first broad analysis of annual reports from Uber and Lyft, which are the dominant players in a sector known as transportation network companies. It covers September 2019 to August 2020, the interval for which the most complete data is available.

Although the transportation agency’s initial goal was to examine ride-hailing’s effects on the state’s people and environment, it also found “pervasive” problems with the commission’s data collection practices.

Among the study’s findings:

• Lyft filed only 36% of the required data with the commission, while Uber reported more than 99%, suggesting that the commission enforced the reporting rules inconsistently. 
• Even basic data on company activity was self-contradictory, with Lyft stating two different figures for its total completed trips that varied by 49.7 million trips, or 81%. Uber’s totals varied by 9.3 million trips, or 6%.
• If San Francisco had accurate figures, Castiglione told the board, it could better assess whether Uber and Lyft are paying the city a per-trip surcharge that funds public transportation.
• Uber produced an estimated 494,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, an amount comparable to that released by the 2020 Caldwell Fire in Northern California, which burned 81,000 acres. Almost a third of those vehicle emissions occurred with no passengers aboard. Because Lyft’s mileage data was incomplete, its emissions could not be estimated.
• While ride-hailing companies promised to reduce congestion through shared travel, the data shows that just 14% of calls are for “pooled” rides, and only 7% are filled.
• Only about half of all requests for wheelchair-accessible vehicles were served. Uber completed 47%, and Lyft 53%.
• Lyft reported three times as many public safety incidents on a per-trip basis as Uber did. These include collisions, assaults, harassments, drunk driving complaints and traffic citations. Lyft reported 30 times as many assaults and harassments as Uber did on a per-trip basis.

However, the study noted that the firms may be reporting differently, “pointing to the need for increased review by regulators.”

The ride-hailing firms have said that more than 99% of their trips end without safety issues, and that they have added security features to their apps. Uber, for example, offers “share my trip,” which lets riders send their location to friends or family. Lyft has a similar option.

The state commission has also released the firms’ 2021 data filings, but the local study said they appeared to be even less complete, and so heavily redacted they could not be fully evaluated.

The Transportation Authority emphasized that the commission, which also regulates driverless vehicles across California, has been heavily redacting its reports on them as well, even though cities need quality data on how the nascent services may affect them.

In 2013 the commission became the first agency in the nation to legalize ride-hailing, and is the only state agency that collects comprehensive data on the industry.

Terrie Prosper, the commission’s spokeswoman, said in an email that the agency was aware of the city’s concerns. “CPUC staff have been working with the TNCs to rectify many of the concerns for the 2020 data and for subsequent reporting years,” she said. 

Uber and Lyft spokespeople said in emails Monday that they had complied with the commission’s requests for information, but questioned the study’s overall conclusions. They did not respond to questions about specific findings.

The commission’s faulty data collection came to light in October 2021, after the Public Press obtained data on assaults and harassments from the 2020 annual safety filings for Uber and Lyft under the California Public Records Act. It was the first public disclosure of any annual ride-hailing safety reports, revealing that numbers the firms submitted to the commission varied widely.

The commission confirmed in a ruling in January 2022 that it had let the ride-hailing giants use varying definitions of sexual assault since at least 2017, and this “could impact the total number and types of incidents reported in their annual reports.”

The commission in June 2022 voted to require uniform definitions in reporting assault complaints. It did not address other categories of data.

San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston, one of several Transportation Authority board members, at the hearing Tuesday expressed frustration with the state commission.  

“We basically privatized and deregulated transportation, and this is what we get: clogged street, no accountability, no data,” he said. “This is a joke. I mean, a cruel joke in terms of data integrity.” 

Read more about the ride-hailing industry and the record of state regulators in our ongoing series, “Ride Hailing’s Dark Data.”

The post Local Planners Say State Failed to Track Safety Incidents on Uber and Lyft appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Sea level rise is forcing cities around San Francisco Bay to weigh demand for new housing against the need to protect communities from flooding. Builders say they can solve this dilemma with cutting-edge civil engineering. But no one knows whether their ambitious efforts will be enough to keep newly built waterfront real estate safe in coming decades.

Meanwhile, developers are busy building — and telling the public that they can mitigate this one effect of climate change, despite mounting evidence that it could be a bigger problem than previously believed.

On Treasure Island, a flat tract of 20th-century landfill with epic bay vistas, workers have poured the foundation for a 22-story tower, the first of six planned high-rise buildings, and broken ground on an affordable housing complex. Another, for families and unhoused veterans, is nearly complete. Townhomes, retail space and a waterfront transit hub are also in the pipeline. All told, the $6 billion development would be home to 20,000 people or more.

Engineers for the public-private consortium transforming the island, Treasure Island Community Development, say they are pursuing aggressive sea rise adaptation strategies. Improvements include raising some of the land by several feet, preparing a buffer zone for future levees and pumps, and setting aside low-lying open space that could convert to floodable marshland as higher bay waters spill onshore.

This is not a cheap endeavor. The development group’s director, Bob Beck, did not return multiple emails and phone calls regarding costs for this work. A 2011 report by the city of San Francisco, which includes Treasure Island, estimated that “geotechnical stabilization” measures would cost $137 million. Storm drains, soil grading and landscape and open-space improvements would add about $120 million.

Dilip Trivedi, the site’s project manager with international engineering firm Moffatt and Nichol, has been touting the consortium’s efforts for more than a decade. He said in a recent interview that the most built-up parts of the island should be safe from sea rise through at least 2070. Fifty years or so is a reasonable planning horizon for new developments, he added, and additional phased seawall construction can help future generations stay a step ahead of ever-higher tides.

“When you put together significant infrastructure, you don’t want to have to maintain it for about that time,” Trivedi said. “It is what we call project life.”

Climate scientists, however, commonly try to predict sea rise out at least to the year 2100, a time when some current schoolchildren could be octogenarian residents of the island.

Every contemporary climate model predicts that, even with deep carbon reductions starting this decade, several feet of sea rise are locked in. The debates for climate adaptation strategy are how many feet and how far down the road we should consider.

With ever more sophisticated climate predictions, the outlook for sea level rise has continued to darken, indicating that current trends will likely accelerate through the end of the century. In one pessimistic scenario — which researchers say is among the possibilities in a “business as usual” global greenhouse gas emissions future — much of the island could find itself underwater frequently, and some of the most developed areas could occasionally be threatened with flooding.

To home in on Treasure Island’s future, the San Francisco Public Press asked researchers at the United States Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, based in Santa Cruz, to provide an analysis of storm conditions under various climate scenarios using sea rise projections by the Ocean Protection Council. They found that bay waters could surge higher than the developers have long been saying publicly.

In that analysis, by 2100 there is a small but not insignificant chance of 4 feet, 11 inches of sea level rise — slightly more than what the island’s engineers have accounted for. Adding in the effects of tides, weather and other transient events, such as in the kind of extreme storm seen once in a century, that total could be 2 feet, 11 inches higher.

The resulting surge would, at least temporarily, send waves 1 foot, 2 inches higher than the lowest ground floors of some planned housing complexes.

While the project’s engineers never address this possibility in their public narratives, documents they have prepared show they have known about similar scenarios for years.

Their own maps, which superimpose flood conditions on existing land elevations, line up fairly closely to the Geological Survey’s map data. Yet the engineers have chosen to downplay the likelihood of these outcomes as they pursued permits to build, arguing that novel construction technologies could make the development invulnerable to flooding under any reasonable course of events.

In a 2016 sea rise adaptation filing with a regional watershed agency, Moffatt and Nichol included six maps showing potential flood conditions in each construction phase, side by side with maps showing how the planned short- and long-term sea level rise protections would prevent inundation. 

One map shows 4 feet of sea rise. Before any land improvements, nearly the entire island would have been inundated — up to 8 feet in places — during flooding calculated by FEMA to have a 1% chance of occurring per year. Another part of that document showed a graph that indicated a 4-foot rise was possible by around 2093. The Geological Survey’s analysis of the Ocean Protection Council extreme scenario for 2100 puts sea rise closer to 5 feet.

But Trivedi said that the raising of the land under many of the buildings, plus additional shoreline improvements, would protect key infrastructure. Beside that map, the engineers showed how the existing 3.5-mile perimeter wall could be raised by 1 to 3 feet, depending on location, which they said would keep much of the island dry, although a note appended to the diagram said: “Does not show intentional flooding from managed retreat on northern and eastern shorelines — TBD.”

Within the last year, regulators have started questioning whether the steps developers are taking are sufficient to guarantee that the island remains dry in the long term.

“This is a community that will be around a while,” said Ethan Lavine, chief of permits for shoreline development for the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. “At a certain point in time, they will need levee protection.” Lavine’s office is pressing Trivedi and his colleagues to use a more cautious view of climate change when assessing whether Treasure Island’s flood prevention techniques can handle what nature might throw at them. 

When evaluating permit applications, government agencies require developers to reference the “best available science” to assess threats from climate change. In October 2021, the engineers issued an update to the 2016 filing. In it, Trivedi compared his firm’s sea level rise expectations against studies by several scientific bodies, including California’s Ocean Protection Council and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His preferred predictions minimized the effect of the worst-case scenarios. The only needed change, he argued, would be to move up the time frame for planning adaptations by as much as five years. 

Yet climate policy experts point out that with significant scientific papers being released each year, guidance for builders has become a moving target. Because they admit a great deal of uncertainty in their predictions, scientists always publish their results in charts that consider an array of environmental assumptions.

That gives developers leeway to choose which predictions to focus on when describing the risks to their capital investments. Treasure Island could be the most expensive local project in the region’s history to take advantage of this ambiguity.

Projecting Optimism

All of Trivedi’s recent public statements conclude that the likelihood of the gloomiest climate scenarios is remote, and that the level of risk to property and lives is insignificant given the proposed engineering fixes. But a close examination of the 2021 adaptation plan offers a few reasons for concern:

• It dismisses high-end forecasts, in which global warming accelerates due to uncontrolled carbon emissions.
• It selectively cites climate models that make planned infrastructure appear sufficient to virtually eliminate future flood risk.
• It focuses on relatively short time frames, such as 20 or 50 years, while offering little specificity about expected conditions at the end of the century, which falls within the lifetimes of some children alive today.

Trivedi said in an interview that for planning purposes, he is focused on one recent predicted milestone: 3 feet of sea rise by 2080. In that circumstance, the ground floors of most buildings, to be built upon a now-elevated development pad, would still have a buffer of nearly 4 feet above the average highest tide of today.

He also asserted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific committee organized by the United Nations, recently reported sea rise could be less severe than previously forecasted, based on the track record of recent years. “What has been observed is that sea level rise is not tracking” to the most pessimistic scenarios, he said. But there are reasons to question his conclusion.

The localized scenario for 2100 examined by the Geological Survey — the one resulting in water levels 1 foot, 2 inches above some developed areas — relies on a climate change prediction assessed to have a probability of 5%, that is, a 1-in-20 statistical chance of occurring. That prediction was published by the California Ocean Protection Council, a body of experts organized by the state government, in recent guidelines for community planning.

Trivedi said the international group’s current report indicates there’s “low confidence in that scenario happening.” When asked for a citation to back up this claim, Trivedi referenced a “localized model” of the findings from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and five other federal agencies.

A report these agencies jointly issued in February 2022 in fact gave a more nuanced view. In a section titled “Future Mean Sea Level,” the authors did exclude one scenario used by the Ocean Protection Council that had been labeled “extreme” and not given a numerical probability. But that is not the scenario Trivedi said the group ruled out. This same report indicates that the West Coast is likely to see 4 to 8 inches of rise over 30 years, accelerating later in the century.

Regardless of the pace of the increase, Treasure Island developers say they have contingency plans relying on future residents or taxpayers to fund the construction of progressively higher walls around the urban zone — several feet every few decades. In its latest update, Moffatt and Nichol said sea level rise of 1 foot by 2043 would trigger the plan to elevate the perimeter.

A strategy reliant on levees might seem risky in light of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when faulty engineering of levees led to catastrophic flooding of parts of New Orleans that sit below the level of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. In light of this recent history, Bay Area regulators are starting to ask whether the Treasure Island plan is entirely watertight.

A March 2022 letter from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency that issued the island’s 2016 permit for waterfront areas, called the update too optimistic and tolerant of long-term flooding potential.

“Public access along a shoreline and a big mixed-use development require using a medium-to-high-risk projection for sea level rise,” said the commission’s planning manager, Erik Buehmann.

Re-engineering Shaky Ground

On an island built by the government generations ago out of rocks, soil and dredged sand, preparing high-and-dry land would be difficult even if it were not in an earthquake and tsunami zone.

In numerous reports and public presentations, Trivedi has said construction workers have elevated land on the 100-acre development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the “base flood elevation” — a height calculated by Federal Emergency Management Agency representing a 1% chance of flooding each year. The homes, hotels and businesses there will be set back from the shoreline by 200 to 300 feet on most sides and as much as 1,000 feet from the northern shore because that area is more prone to flooding. Building is planned to roll out in phases through 2035.

Workers have spent years using cranes to repeatedly drop heavy weights to compact the soil. They have driven vibrating probes into the earth, filling the holes with concrete for stabilization. They then piled 1 million cubic yards of soil atop the compacted layer. These measures are intended to prevent the kind of ground liquefaction seen in the Marina District and elsewhere during the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Other geological improvements include inserting vertical wick drains, akin to long drinking straws, to help remove water from the soil as it compresses. These techniques have been used by civil engineers around the world for more than 30 years to develop areas without easy access to bedrock.

Trivedi said these measures, together with a jagged, rocky seawall raised to allow for just over 1 foot of sea rise, would help take energy out of large waves, and the setback would use the landscape to dissipate any possible overtopping before it reaches valuable structures.

At the same time, the engineers have recognized that much of the island — particularly the low-lying northern end — are indefensible. Areas that have flooded in the past will eventually be sacrificed to rising waters. That strategy has immediate, concrete consequences: Dozens of existing structures, including homes of about 3,000 people currently living there, are set to be demolished to create open space. Over time these areas could be turned into tidal marshland to protect the newly developed areas from storms.

Regulators Balk at a Sunny Assessment

The Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency most empowered to weigh in on new waterfront building, is hamstrung by a legal mandate to regulate only what happens 100 feet inland, regardless of elevation — an artifact of legislation dating from before climate change was a dominant concern.

The 2016 permit the agency issued for improvements on Treasure Island’s margins, including a ferry terminal, required adaptation updates every five years. Moffatt and Nichol’s 2021 update concluded that the original adaptation plans needed few changes, except for possibly needing to accelerate, by five years, the planning process for building higher perimeter levees.

Regulators balked at the assessment. In a March 2022 letter, the commission advised Moffatt and Nichol to plan more conservatively. The agency demanded consideration of a 1-in-200 chance sea rise scenario, in which seas rise 6 feet, 11 inches by 2100. Adding in a 100-year storm surge, waves could plausibly overtop portions of the sea wall along the southeastern side by about 1 to 2 feet, and along the northern end by about 1 foot. That is an even worse outcome than that predicted by Geological Survey’s localized flooding model.

The commission said Moffatt and Nichol seemed too dismissive of chances that things could go wrong.

“The permittees decided to design the project considering very low risk of sea level rise related impacts” the letter said, noting also that engineers seemed too focused on the short time horizon of 2080.

Trivedi counters that the Treasure Island development was never built upon projections of a certain sea level happening by a certain date, because seawalls can, for all practical purposes, be built arbitrarily high, on whatever schedule is needed.

“We adopted an approach where we decided on an allowance we are building into the project,” he said in the interview. “As future projections come out, we will adjust the date of the adaptation.”

Commission staff met with planners from Moffatt and Nichol last summer to work out the requested additions to the 2021 adaptation strategy. Buehmann, who worked on the original permit, said follow-up discussions were to be expected because the Treasure Island permit was the first since the commission began requiring builders to submit sea rise assessments. “We didn’t expect it to be perfect the first time,” he said.

Whatever comes of this process  which Trivedi referred to as merely “an internal thing” that was required for the filing — the adaptation plan is unlikely to change significantly, because the development pad is already in place and huge construction cranes are sprouting up on Treasure Island’s skyline. What is left in the playbook is raising future seawalls, ceding the northern open space and the installation of pumps.

Government officials have long acknowledged the inevitability of Treasure Island’s relying on artificial barriers. In 2015, Brad McCrea, regulatory program director at the commission, told the Public Press: “At the end of the day, this will be a levee-protected community — there’s no getting around that.” Since then, agency staff have not changed their view.

Rapidly Outdated Climate Science

To determine how high to raise the building pad, Treasure Island builders consulted several climate studies published as early as 1987 and as recently as 2007. At that point, scientists were predicting that by 2100, oceans could rise as much as 4 feet, 7 inches.

This forecast was echoed by a state panel of scientists and policy experts in 2009, when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Treasure Island to announce its findings and call for better sea level rise mitigation.

Moffatt and Nichol then relied on these studies to anticipate that the oceans would rise 3 feet by 2075. So the company proposed raising the development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the predicted levels for a once-in-a-hundred-year flood.

Moffatt and Nichol did not spell out a rationale for setting the height of the development pad, as the Public Press reported in 2010. The firm did argue that raising it higher could create other problems, such as jeopardizing the island’s stability under the weight of packed soil and adding expense. “At some point it doesn’t become cost-effective — it’s a matter of acceptable levels of risk over your planning horizon,” Trivedi said in an interview then.

To be sure, when Treasure Island plans were drawn up, scientific modeling showed wide uncertainty about how much global temperatures could increase. In 2009, scientists around the world were saying that oceans could rise anywhere from a minimum of 3 feet, 3 inches to a maximum of 4 feet, 11 inches by 2100. At that time, the effects of ice melt from land via glaciers, snowpacks and ice caps were little understood.

Today, European and U.S. scientists using satellite imagery to measure the shape of Greenland’s ice sheets say melting is outstripping gains from snowfall. In a paper published last August, they found that no matter how much countries curb emissions, seas will rise by a minimum of 11 inches from this effect alone.  

Focusing Locally

The U.S. Geological Survey developed the Coastal Storm Modeling System to help protect waterfront communities. It simulates the forces behind wave and wind data and translates them into local flood projections that include tides, storm surges, waves and seasonal events such as El Niño.

The Public Press requested that the agency simulate a small section of San Francisco Bay, in the vicinity of Treasure Island, relying on probability scenarios for global sea levels in 2100 developed by the California Ocean Protection Council in a 2018 guidance paper. This report offered up sea rise projections of likelihoods as high as 50% and as low as 0.5%. 

The Ocean Protection Council’s examination of a wide array of probabilities heavily influenced the Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s critique of the Treasure Island adaptation update. The commission’s biggest concern was that change might happen faster than the engineers were anticipating.

[Explore sea level rise scenarios using Climate Central’s interactive tool. Here we show floodwaters at 7.8 feet above the present-day high tide line. ]

But Trivedi said the Ocean Protection Council’s past predictions had already failed. “If you look at the year 2022 projections, follow the OPC formulas,” Trivedi said. “We should have seen about 8 inches of sea level rise since 2000. In reality, it has been about 2 inches or less.”

Most forecasts predict increased global temperatures due to persistent carbon pollution. But the emissions projections are still hotly contested.

The Ocean Protection Council examined two emissions scenarios. One assumed that carbon dioxide output doubles through 2050. The other imagined more aggressive greenhouse gas reductions — 70% by 2050 and “net zero” emissions by 2080.

For the purposes of seeing how bad things could plausibly get, the U.S. Geological Survey used a midlevel emissions scenario. This decision was based on detailed simulations into the next century of swell and waves along the Pacific Ocean. What the researchers found was that paradoxically, milder greenhouse gas levels generated worse storms for California’s coast than do extreme ones. 

“What’s really changed in the research community is that worst-case scenarios have become more common,” said Patrick Barnard, a research geologist with the agency. “The state is asking communities to prepare for these.”

This approach helps waterfront areas learn to be more risk-averse to protect property and lives.

Avoiding Mistakes of the Past

Foster City is paying a high price for waterfront sprawl. Like Treasure Island, the mid-Peninsula community 25 miles to the south was built entirely on landfill, not unusual in the Bay Area, where efforts to accommodate population growth stretching back to the Gold Rush consumed most of the wetlands and tidal marshes.

Foster City did have worries about flooding decades ago. It is shot through with artificial waterways, including two sloughs, several small canals and an artificial lagoon. Barely above sea level before being developed, it would not exist if not for its levees and seawalls. 

Yet, in 2014 FEMA informed Foster City officials that new studies showed the levee system was neither strong nor tall enough to withstand a major storm and the large waves that would result. Update the seawalls and levees, or the entire city would be designated a floodplain, the agency said. 

Sixty years ago, developers there hauled in tons of sand to raise the land several feet to construct thousands of homes in what became a 33,000-resident community. That was a time when climate change was not a part of city planning vernacular. Today workers are busy widening and raising levees and adding interlocking steel plates as a bulwark against the storms federal regulators warned of, as well as rising seas.

But Treasure Island, which is slated to add 8,000 units of housing to accommodate more than 20,000 residents, is still more than a decade away from build-out. What the engineers put in place there in the next few years could avoid Foster City’s mistakes — or compound them.

To be sure, some cities are starting to alter blueprints on pace with the evolving science. In October, the Port of San Francisco announced it was collaborating with the Army Corps of Engineers to study how to shore up the city’s seawall along its eastern waterfront, from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Hunters Point Shipyard, to combat both sea rise and earthquake risk. This area includes attractions like the Chase Center sports arena, a project green-lighted before a city-commissioned study surfaced that predicted flooding from sea level rise in the new Mission Bay neighborhood, as the Public Press reported in 2017.

Port officials now say they anticipate 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. That is 2 feet, 5 inches higher than the level Treasure Island’s developers are planning for in their adaptation strategy.

The Port’s yearlong effort will consider elevating barriers along the Embarcadero, installing a system of locks at Mission Creek and buying back and cleaning up privately owned landfill areas around Islais Creek to return them to the tidal zone.

Not Easy to Abandon a Home

In the grips of a housing affordability crisis, San Francisco needs new construction. But is a flood zone the wisest place to build? That could depend on how long we expect buildings to last.

Barnard, of the U.S. Geological Survey, has traveled to many communities, including Okracoke Island, part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, to assess how to protect people from storms. In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian shut the island down to visitors. For residents, it was hard to consider leaving a place they have inhabited for seven or eight generations. “You can’t detach people from their place, or their heart,” Barnard said. “They’ll stay until water is up to their nose.” 

Before the developers moved in, Treasure Island had roughly 3,000 residents, according to the 2020 Census, many living in homes built for the U.S. Navy in the mid-20th century when it was a military base. Nearly half have a household income less than $50,000, and many do not speak English. 

Now these residents are on tenterhooks. Under an agreement with the developer, people who lived on Treasure Island before 2011 are guaranteed new affordable and rent-controlled units. But the wait times and other inconveniences have been tough. Everyone is living in a construction site with an unreliable electrical grid that browns and blacks out frequently. 

The new units are supposed to be comparable to what they had, but longtime islander Christoph Opperman said they have been offered “interim” units that, for example, might not have enough space for a family, or lack laundry facilities.

“They’re picking us off one neighborhood at a time by making us do two moves,” Opperman said. “We’re not entitled to just anything on the island, but we are entitled to fair treatment.”

Treasure Island’s planners are essentially acknowledging that they must sacrifice part of the island to the bay, even while pursuing a more built-up urban environment just several hundred feet away. This combination of advance and retreat is all part of the plan, the engineers say.

Asked whether he would move to Treasure Island, Trivedi did not hesitate to say yes, observing that no part of the Bay Area was completely free of danger.

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “I mean, should people be moving to San Francisco, because of the seismic risk? Buildings are being designed to codes. And flooding is the same way.”

A version of this story was republished in partnership with Inside Climate News.

This reporting is supported by grants from the Solutions Journalism Network’s Business and Sustainability Initiative and by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Correction 5/4/2023: An earlier version of this story misstated the process the U.S. Geological Survey used to report an extreme flood projection for Treasure Island. The model upon which it was based was produced not by the agency, but by the Ocean Protection Council. Also, the likelihood of that scenario is higher than originally given — 5%, not 0.5 %.

The post Promising to Prevent Floods at Treasure Island, Builders Downplay Risk of Sea Rise appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

In 1978, the U.S. government created a path to recognizing Indian tribes in the United States. Four years later, the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, a tribe native to Yosemite Valley, submitted its initial request to become a recognized tribe.

The tribe is still waiting.

Obtaining federal recognition is often seen as the “golden ticket,” because it allows tribes to organize collectively and access federal resources. Recognized tribes can get funds for housing or climate resilience, for example. They also can establish sovereign governmental status, giving them authority to collect taxes and administer laws.

“It means that tribes have the ability to take care of their community members through health, through education and through other services that the government promised us when they stole our land hundreds of years ago and continue to steal our land now,” said Cristina Azocar, an Indigenous journalist and professor at San Francisco State University.

California has the highest Native American population in the country and is also home to the majority of non-federally recognized tribes. The Death Valley TimbiSha Shoshone Band is the only California tribe that has been recognized in the 44 years since the federal acknowledgement process was established.

In the last 13 years, the U.S. Department of Interior has actively reviewed applications for acknowledgement of only 18 tribes, even as hundreds remain in line. The Public Press has identified more than 400 tribes seeking federal recognition and is working to confirm that 200 others with publicly listed applications are genuine. Many have been waiting for decades.

A Public Press request for expedited release of records listing all non-federally recognized tribes was denied by the Department of the Interior, as was an appeal of that denial. No timeline has been given for their release.

The application process is long, complex and stringent. While the government gives tribes tight deadlines to submit documentation, it allows itself unlimited time to review materials after its initial assessment. On top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a slowdown in processing.

“Especially during COVID, tribes that had federal recognition were much more able to take care of their people than tribes without federal recognition,” Azocar said. “My own tribe, we were sent tests, we were sent masks.”

Federal recognition also gives tribes access to emergency funding from sources like the $2.2 trillion in COVID stimulus funding provided by the Cares Act, federally funded health care and education, the right to operate casinos, and the ability to convert their land into housing. 

A rigorous process

The federal acknowledgement process set up in 1978 is the main path tribes take to become recognized and listed in the National Registry, an annually updated reference list. As of this year, there are 574 recognized tribes, most of which received their designation through treaties, acts of Congress, executive orders, reaffirmation from the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs or federal court decisions.

The government prefers the administrative process because documentation is required, and it’s perceived as objective. But it’s difficult for tribes to collect all the documentation needed to apply and a lot of tribes cannot complete — or in some cases, even start — the process, given the time and expense involved.

Since 1978, 34 tribes have been denied acknowledgement, and 18 tribes approved. Currently, there are only six tribes under review to become recognized, and that includes two California tribes: the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation — from Yosemite Valley — and the Ahmah Mutsun Band of Ohlone Indians from the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Native American grassroots movement of the late 1960s inspired many tribes to seek recognition, and petitions to the government increased in the 1970s. As a result, the Department of Interior created the administrative process and the Office of Federal Acknowledgement to manage applications that first became effective on Oct. 2, 1978.

The first set of regulations, revised in 1994, required tribes to collect all sorts of historical and anthropological evidence to meet seven criteria that prove their continuous existence, activities and cohesion as a tribe from the 1800s to the present.

“In some cases, there’s thousands and thousands of documents,” Azocar said. “The process has gotten more and more rigorous, even though there is nothing that says that it necessarily has to meet a certain standard, but there is a precedent that has been set.”

In 2015, the regulations were revised again, and the amount of evidence required was reduced. Now, tribes have to show only documentation from the early 1900s to the present day, but this is often still an overwhelming challenge. The goal of the revision was to make the process more transparent and flexible in recognition of the fact that all tribes were not homogenous. Even so, the administration still asked for evidence that in some cases was impossible to produce.

“The Office of Federal Acknowledgement suggested that it gather phone records of tribal members who had conversations with each other,” said Azocar, referencing the Little Shell Tribe in a passage in her book, News Media and the Indigenous Fight for Federal Recognition. “And I thought, that’s crazy. How would you actually be able to go about doing that?”

In addition, since tribes had no way to know they would need the records later, they didn’t always keep documentation.

To date, no tribe has been recognized through the new regulations introduced in 2015. Lee Fleming, director of the Office of Federal Acknowledgement within the Department of the Interior, declined to answer Azocar’s questions about the administrative process, and did not explain why the process took so long or how they hired staff to perform the reviews.

The government made documenting Native American tribal history challenging in multiple ways. The Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, for example, had negotiated a treaty with U.S. in the 1850s, but the U.S. Congress did not ratify it. It was the peak of the Gold Rush, and the interests of white Californians were prioritized. The census also did not start counting Indians until 1850, and many tribes had already been displaced from their homelands.

“There were no records of Indians before 1815, so that is also a problem with getting historical documentation when tribes weren’t even part of the count of our country,” Azocar said.

And some of the evidence tribes are tasked with submitting was erased by racist laws. In Virginia, “You can’t trace your ancestry back past 1924,” Azocar said. A law called the Racial Integrity Act required anyone who was not white, including Native Americans, to be registered as “colored” on birth or marriage certificates.

Evidence collection can be costly, too. The Native American Rights Fund spent 29 years and more than 3,400 attorney hours on the federal recognition of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana, Azocar said. “The cost of that time was already in excess of $1 million.”

Even after all the expenditures, the tribe was not recognized through the federal acknowledgement process, but in an act of Congress as part of the National Defense Authorization Act in 2020.

“It’s really difficult, because often a tribe can’t do it itself,” Azocar said. “It has to hire historians, it has to hire anthropologists. And these often cost money unless somebody’s willing to do it for free.”

A fight for recognition

The application process requires tribes to meet seven criteria: that they have existed continuously over a historical period, that they constitute a unique and distinct community, that they have political authority over their tribal members, that they have an internal governing structure in place, that membership consists of individuals descended from a historical Indian tribe, that those members are not part of any other federally acknowledged tribe, and that the U.S. government has not forbidden or terminated recognition of the tribe.

In 1982, after the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation notified the government that it intended to seek federal recognition, it had to undergo several rounds of documentation production and technical review. Two years after filing its letter of intent, the tribe submitted its initial documented petition prepared by anthropologists Lowell John Bean and Sylvia Brakke, who worked to change the depictions of California Indians. The tribe then spent 14 years gathering additional evidence.

In 1998, the tribe was ready. But the government was not. It was not until 2010 that the tribe was designated “active consideration” — meaning the government is ready to review the tribe’s application. At that point, the administration had one year to complete the review. The Interior Department filed 21 extensions, giving itself more than eight years to complete its initial evaluation.

“We’ve been put on hold now, all this time,” said Sandra Chapman, the tribe’s chairwoman. “We’re trying to get a meeting with Deb Haaland. We need to have her backing.” Haaland is the Secretary of the Interior, the first Indigenous woman to hold a Cabinet-level position.

In 2018, the Interior Department’s Office of Federal Acknowledgement published a preliminary finding denying recognition to the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation. The tribe did not meet the community criterion and more evidence needed to be submitted on the history, geography, culture and social organization of the group, the office said.

To better understand the decision, the tribe filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all correspondence and documents from the Office of Federal Acknowledgement relating to the decision-making process on its request. Four years later, the tribe is still waiting for a response.

The tribe has submitted about 200 years’ worth of evidence, dating back to the 1800s, as required by the 1994 regulations. The documentation would have been cut in half under the new regulations, but that would restart the application process. 

The Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation has a federal acknowledgement committee and a membership committee that have worked to get its documentation compiled. “We have our genealogy, all documented,” Chapman said. “We are going to send that evidence to Washington, we’re going to overload them with all kinds of evidence, we’re going to give them more than they asked for and see what they say now.”

Tribe members have also received support from Yosemite National Park, which has an ongoing consultation relationship with seven tribes, including the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, also known as the American Indian Council of Mariposa County.

“This relationship has existed for over 40 years,” a letter of support from the park for the tribe’s recognition said, noting that its “ancestral ties to Yosemite National Park have spanned multiple generations … and began prior to the establishment of the Park.” The U.S. Congress passed the first law protecting the Yosemite area in 1864 and created the park itself in 1890.

“We’re a strong community,” said Chapman, pointing to letters of support from local residents and the Board of Supervisors as well as the Park Service, which also welcomed a traditional village on the land. “How can you build a roundhouse on, you know, federal land? If you’re not a tribe?”

Azocar pointed to the tourism industry surrounding Yosemite National Park as a reason the government may be reluctant to grant the tribe recognition.

“If the tribe had further recognition, it would potentially have more power to have not just a lease, but have a stand to reclaim some of the territory,” she said, noting that “reclamation of territory is not necessarily in the interest of the federal government.”

The initial denial of recognition puts the tribe in phase two of the federal recognition process, giving members an opportunity to present additional evidence that they should be recognized. The tribe is working to rebut the denial and requesting public comment letters to aid in the effort. Comments close on Nov. 11, 2022.

If an application has been given a final decision, and federal acknowledgement is denied, the tribe cannot apply again. Tribes can seek alternative routes such as the courts or lobbying state senates to federally acknowledge them through public law, but these methods are just as expensive and difficult.

Some states offer tribes recognition, but it doesn’t come with federal benefits, like health and education assistance. But it can help with the federal recognition process to demonstrate a relationship over time with other governments, Azocar said.

“I am passionate that we become federally recognized,” Chapman said. “Our ancestors had wanted it. I remember my mom and dad saying they wanted to be recognized. It’s the recognition that you get that the government is saying, I know who you are.”

— Additional research and reporting contributed by Jordyn Gleaton

Jordyn Gleaton helped research and produced the graphics for this article. She is working with the San Francisco Public Press as a 2022 Dow Jones News Fund data journalism intern. Gleaton is entering her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is double majoring in political science and legal studies, and pursuing a human rights interdisciplinary minor.

The post California Indian Tribes Denied Resources for Decades as Federal Acknowledgement Lags appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

More than one month after statewide eviction protections expired on June 30, less than 4% of rent relief funds requested by San Francisco households remain unprocessed, with 55% of funds paid out. 

Over 20,600 San Francisco households had asked for almost $340 million in rent and utility assistance from both state and local COVID-19 rent relief programs as of the week of July 11, government figures show. The amount requested declined 9% between April 11 and July 11 as the state continued to weed out ineligible applications. The state stopped accepting applications on March 31, more than a year after it opened a financial aid program to cover housing debt incurred by tenants due to pandemic hardship. 

Households whose applications have been approved can stay an eviction even if they have not received payment yet; however, those with applications under review or pending applicant information — a category that applies to 1,154 applicants in San Francisco — are vulnerable to eviction.  

California passed legislation to ensure all eligible households who applied by the March 31 deadline will receive funding. Recent budget proposals would earmark additional money for rent relief. 

The following figures include San Francisco residents’ requests from California’s COVID-19 Rent Relief Program and San Francisco’s original Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which stopped taking applications in September 2021. It does not include requests from the city’s newest rent relief program, which began accepting applications April 1. 

Over $140 million in rent and utilities requested from the state program by San Franciscans had been denied as of the week of July 11. Almost 1,000 San Francisco applicants appealed their denials. 

On July 7, an Alameda County Superior Court judge barred the state from denying any more pending applications or any appeals of denials that occurred in the previous 30 days until a hearing is held to determine if applicants’ rights to due process were violated in the application review process. 

In 2021, California received $5.2 billion for emergency rental assistance funds from the federal government. The state has since acquired nearly one out of every three dollars of federal reallocations of unused funds from other states, for a total of $198 million.  

Tenants who had previously applied to the program and were awaiting rent relief were protected from eviction through June 30 for rent due between April 2020 and April 2022 under AB 2179. Under the same bill, local eviction protections passed unanimously by the Board of Supervisors in March were voided until July 1, but have since taken effect.  

In response to the state’s move to cease accepting applications, the city reopened its own rent relief program for tenants who are seeking funds for rent debt accumulated in April and beyond. So far, it has distributed close to $4.3 million in funds to 713 of the 4,415 households that have applied, and residents who need help are encouraged to apply. 

In its previous rent relief program, San Francisco assisted over 3,200 applicants with $22.8 million in relief. An additional $243,878 in requests from 53 households are yet to be processed. 

The statewide eviction moratorium, protecting tenants who could not pay rent because of COVID-19 hardship, was originally scheduled to end Jan. 31, 2021, but lawmakers extended it twice. Following the moratorium’s final end date, Sept. 30, San Francisco tenants became vulnerable to eviction for nonpayment of rent if they had not paid at least 25% of the rents due in the preceding 13 months, as well as October’s rent. 

However, California lawmakers did create some protections for renters who were unable to pay back rent after the moratorium expired. Tenants who applied to the state’s rent relief program before the deadline and were waiting on relief were protected from eviction through March 2022. State lawmakers in late March extended those protections through June 30. 

Even though they may have been barred from evicting some tenants, starting in November 2021, landlords could sue tenants to obtain unpaid rent that was due from March 2020 through September 2021. If a landlord pursues the debt in small claims court, they and the tenant must represent themselves in the courtroom. 

Are you facing eviction? Call the Eviction Defense Collaborative at (415) 659-9184 or send an email to legal@evictiondefense.org as soon as possible. The organization advises that tenants respond within five days of being served with court papers to avoid the risk of a default judgment against them.

Is your landlord suing you to recover pandemic rent debt? Go here to read our guide on how small claims court works, and how to argue your side of the case.

The post San Francisco Rent Relief Tracker appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“The state’s decision to let the last of its emergency eviction protections expire prioritizes big landlords and real estate industry profits over stabilizing the low-income households and communities of color most impacted by the pandemic,” said Molly Goldberg, director of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition. She cited language and access barriers, in addition to ending the application period and preempting local evictions in March.

The state said that it has paid out “completed eligible applications,” though an additional 6,000 applications are pending due to applicants being unresponsive to requests for additional documentation, said Geoffrey Ross, deputy of federal financial assistance at the Department of Housing and Community Development. Advocates and some tenants who have been deemed “unresponsive” pointed to language barriers in communications as a reason why certain households have not responded within the desired time period.

However, San Francisco officials’ understanding is that these payments may take an additional three to four weeks to reach landlords, said Audrey Abadilla, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. The city is concerned about the delay’s impact on residents, small landlords and affordable housing providers, she said, and continues to urge the state “to exercise the greatest amount of urgency and flexibility in the approval and payment of CA COVID-19 Rent Relief applications.”

Though the 6,000 households with incomplete pending applications and denied tenants awaiting decisions on appeals are still vulnerable to eviction, cities and advocates hope the enactment of new protections will help to fill the gap for struggling tenants facing eviction for rent due after June 30.

Under Assembly Bill 2179, landlords could not evict a tenant with COVID-19 hardships for unpaid rent due between April 1, 2020, and March 31, 2022, as long as the tenant had applied for rent relief by the deadline and had not been denied. The bill also preempted eviction protections passed by local governments after Aug. 20, 2020, voiding protections unanimously passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and signed into law by Mayor London Breed in March.

The preemption on local protections expired Thursday, allowing San Francisco’s March legislation to take effect Friday. Tenants in the city can no longer be evicted for nonpayment of rent due on or after July 1 until the city’s declared state of emergency ends, but the protections have a gap for back rent due from April 1 to June 30.

“The state has no longer stepped up and it’s up to the cities and counties to step up and do so,” said Ora Prochovnik, director of litigation and policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative. “And those that haven’t, their residents will definitely be harmed.”

A coalition of tenants’ research, advocacy and legal groups called on local and state lawmakers on Tuesday to take action to prevent the evictions of tenants waiting for their applications to be paid out or their appeals to be processed. The group included the National Equity Atlas, Housing Now! and Western Center on Law & Poverty speakers, in addition to applicants to the program who were waiting on funds.

“How am I supposed to move forward from this? Am I gonna go live with Governor Newsom in his guest house?” asked Patricia Mendoza of Imperial City, a single mother of two. Mendoza, who spoke through tears at times, said she applied for assistance once and was approved, but has now been waiting five months for funds after reapplying for $9,000 in assistance. She has received an eviction notice from her landlord and said that it’s been very stressful and unstable for her and her children, one of whom is in seventh grade.

“I urge everyone to please think of us tenants,” she said.  

The California Apartment Association is urging members to hold off on evicting tenants with pending applications, as the money for qualifying tenants should be arriving soon and the onus is on rental assistance program administrators to make this happen, said Debra Carlton, executive vice president of state public affairs at the California Apartment Association.

Researchers and advocates have been warning of the potential for an eviction wave with the expiration of protections.

Old protections and new vulnerabilities

The state closed the doors to new applications on March 31 while extending eviction protections to June 30. That gave the department of Housing and Community Development three months to process outstanding applications so tenants waiting on relief would not be evicted while awaiting a decision.

“It would be cruel, wasteful and unfair to subject Californians to eviction for loss of rental income now, when they have done everything asked of them by filing and completing their application,” Assembly member and co-author of AB 2179 Tim Grayson, a Democrat from Concord, told the state Senate before it voted to extend protections on March 31.

Assembly member Buffy Wicks, a co-author and Democrat from Oakland, did not share why she and other legislators failed to extend protections for the tenants waiting on aid who are now at risk. She did note that qualified tenants who submitted applications by the deadline will receive assistance, and that local governments are able to enact eviction protections now that statewide protections have expired.

The state’s rent relief program has paid over 339,000 households close to $4 billion in assistance, according to the California COVID-19 Rent Relief Dashboard.

Previously, tenants whose applications were denied had 30 days to appeal the decision, which could stay an eviction. However, with the expiration of protections, tenants can appeal but are no longer protected from eviction until a final decision is made — even if the program eventually rules in their favor.

Close to one in three applications statewide had been denied as of June 23.

Sarah Treuhaft, vice president of Research at PolicyLink, said denials jumped from 20% when the program stopped accepting applications to close to 33% as of June 23, calling the rise a “huge concern.” She also noted that 93% of denials were for low-income applicants.

“Given the program increased in ability to process applications, there was an increase in approvals and denials as all applications were actively case managed,” said Ross of the state housing agency in response to questions about the increase in denials.

The Department of Housing and Community Development is facing multiple lawsuits related to the program. The most recent one, filed in June, critiques the program’s lack of transparency, especially regarding the reason for denials and cites a disproportionate harm to tenants based on race, color and national origin.

New local protections

AB 2179’s preemption on local protections was heavily criticized by tenants’ rights groups. Sen. Scott Wiener and Assembly person Phil Ting, both representatives of San Francisco, were the only two lawmakers to vote against the bill, citing the preemption.

“We are thrilled that the city has done what it can to protect its residents by putting this protection in place,” Prochovnik of the Eviction Defense Collaborative said, adding that cities cannot provide certain aspects of the state’s protections related to court procedures.

Due to the previous preemptions, the city’s legislation only protects tenants from eviction for rental debt incurred after July 1, 2022. Thus, if a San Francisco tenant could not pay rent in April when the state’s rent relief program had closed to new requests, they could be evicted for failure to pay, but a tenant who was unable to pay rent due in July would be protected.

“The unfairness is palpable,” Prochovnik said.   

The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development reopened its own rent relief program for applications on April 1 after the state closed its program, and as of June 24 had made close to $2.9 million in relief payments to 504 of the 3,467 households that have applied.

The city continues to coordinate efforts to keep tenants housed through its rent relief program, eviction defense system and legal assistance program, said Abadilla, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development spokesperson.

San Francisco tenants are entitled to legal aid in eviction cases under the city’s universal right to counsel program — the first of its kind in the country and the only program of its type in the state.

Abadilla encouraged tenants who received an eviction notice to call, email or visit the Eviction Defense Collaborative. Those who are behind on rent should apply for San Francisco’s rent relief program.

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