Election Recommendations - February 15, 2022, San Francisco Special Election

[Editor's Note:  You know you're in trouble in San Francisco when you run for office from the Left and one of the most respected Progressives in the City is totally on board with your recall.  Here is a link to Heather Knight's interview with Matt Gonzales]

SHORT FORM:  Vote Yes to Recall (Remove) current San Francisco School Board members Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga.  (Afterthought:  Vote yes for Joaquin Torres for Assessor-Recorder.)

LONG FORM:  While there are legitimate criticisms of the recall system (for example the wasteful use of it against Governor Newsom), every now and again invoking the recall process makes sense.  This is one of them. 

The upcoming recall election for three members of the San Francisco Board of Education is both specific to the targeted board members as well as a referendum on the current Board of Education as a whole.  While much of the focus has been on the repellant behavior of Alison Collins (a bit more about this later), the Board as a whole clearly has problems with priorities and seems to be tilting at windmills while Rome burns (to mix metaphors horribly).  It mismanaged Covid19 (enraging parents and teachers alike), micro-managed to the point of almost losing its Superintendent (who had to extract a promise from the Board to behave), mishandled highly divisive racial issues involving the Lowell High School admission process, botched the handling of allegedly insensitive murals at George Washington High School (my alma mater and I’m not persuaded), and became the object of derision regarding renaming schools based on a heavy handed racial agenda and lousy research. 

(Note that I do not take the Board to task for the $125 million budget shortfall.  While one can probably attack the Board’s priorities there as well, in fairness it’s almost impossible for a big city school district not to be in a deficit condition.  But the list above strikes me as pretty awful even without raising the issue of the deficit.)

The other members of the Board are not currently subject to a recall petition because they have not served long enough to be subject to one.  Yet.

I have a growing respect for Joe Eskenazi’s truly excellent news blog, Mission Local and his article in March of last year regarding the Board of Education is well worth reading.  Here’s a link.  The article discusses the awful tweets by Collins regarding Asian Americans in the years before her election and her totally tone-deaf defense/pseudo-apology regarding them.  No wonder that so many elected officials demanded her resignation, including State Senator Scott Weiner, a true policy wonk and one who I respect.

As if this was not enough, then there is Collins’ remarkably ill-advised and now voluntarily dismissed (by her) $87 million lawsuit against the School District, the City & County of San Francisco, and five members of the Board of Education.  Again, Eskenazi does an excellent job describing this train wreck as well (here’s the link).    

Where I can add slightly to the mix, as a practicing lawyer, is to point out that even Collins, presumably with the benefit of legal advice, was not prepared to go forward with the lawsuit after her initial filing was dismissed by the federal judge presiding over the case (who, if it matters (which it shouldn’t), also happens to be African American).  Here’s a link to the decision.  In terms of potential legal merit it is a total wipeout -- the judge ruled that Collins’ claims were either nonstarters as a matter of law or were insufficient to the point of requiring her to re-plead the claims in a manner that addressed the court’s concerns about their sufficiency (regarding which the court was clearly dubious).  Giving a litigant one (or even multiple) opportunities to replead is par for the course and the standard for legal viability at the pleading stage is really low (the claims have to be legally “plausible”).  But rather than trying to meet this very low bar, she elected to dismiss her lawsuit.  I also see from the court’s order and the docket that six of the parties filed a motion to strike the complaint based on a California statute that protects First Amendment speech and imposes extra requirements on a plaintiff to show, at the pleading stage, potential merit to his/her litigation or run the risk of having attorney’s fees and costs awarded against the plaintiff in addition to striking the pleading.  But that was a non-event as the Board declined to instruct its attorneys to pursue Collins for the approximately $125,000 in legal fees incurred in defending her lawsuit  (Note that there was no guarantee that the moving parties would win such a motion but it certainly struck me as something I would seriously consider if I was advising the Board, particularly in light of the judge’s dismissal ruling.)  Remarkably, one of her target defendants, Board of Education member (and himself also a recall target), Faauuga Moliga, was quoted in the Chronicle as not wishing to pursue potential reimbursement of legal expense because “[t]here are other issues the board needs to be focused on.  I would like to get beyond the drama and work on the substantive issues that require our attention.”  Here’s a link to the article.  This strikes me as bizarre.

The third recall target, Board President Gabriela López, while managing not to insult people left and right (unlike Collins) merits recall because she is part of the board majority that has furthered the disastrous policies and the tone that I have noted previously in this post.  Interestingly, Ms. López herself agrees that the performance of the board should be considered as a whole and has quite deliberately chosen not to differentiate herself from her colleagues.  She says so in an interview with Vanessa Rancaño of KQED.  Here’s the link.  I am not persuaded by her defense of the board’s actions, much less her effort to play the race card here or characterize the recall as some kind of power play by the Mayor or some other form of power politics.  If the Mayor gets to appoint replacement board members as a result of the recall, that is simply a part of the process -- someone has to fill these seats in the event of a vacancy and I can’t say that the alternative, appointment by the Board of Supervisors, does much for me either.

Now you might wonder how people like this got to be elected in the first place.  One reason is that this is an entry-level position into the political hierarchy (Senator Feinstein got her start as a member of the school board).  These candidates often have no track record in terms of policy or competence and there is not a lot of interest in these races as a general rule.  I have to confess that the sheer obscurity of the office prompted me not to take a close look at these candidates in past blog posts.  But they are under the microscope now and the result, to me, is clear -- vote yes on the recall and do so as to all three of the targeted board members.

Almost as an aside, Joaquín Torres is running unopposed for Assessor/Recorder, filling the spot vacated by Carmen Chu when the latter accepted the position of City Administrator.  The Bay Area Reporter (a publication that focuses on the LGBTQ community) had a nice short piece endorsing him and discussing his history, which is rather interesting (and not necessarily what you may be thinking).  Here’s the link.  So that you have a little context, here is what I’ve said in the past about this particular job:

Every election cycle I get to point out that this particular job may not be needed – the Assessor-Recorder function is purely bureaucratic.  The only time discretion gets involved typically results in the incumbent getting jailed for fraud (really – that happened back in the late 60s).  But accepting that the job is not going to be abolished any time soon, [the then incumbent] Carmen Chu has done a perfectly competent job and should be retained. 

One can say the same for Mr. Torres and, with that, ‘nuff said.

I’ll see you later this year when I publish my blog post on the June ballot, including yet another recall effort, this time involving District Attorney Chesa Boudin.  I may also get back into the business of blogging beyond election recommendations, but time will tell.