Tag: Mayor Ed Lee

As a union carpenter and general contractor with over 30 years of experience, I can safely say that the first year under San Francisco’s landmark new local hiring law exceeded even my hopeful expectations. The next step is to identify and support local community contractors. The City can partner with local contractors who actively recruit and employ local residents.

These are clear signs that we can use the City’s local hiring policy to get more local workers onto public projects and break cycles of poverty in our most disadvantaged communities while continuing to save taxpayer money on construction. Our local hiring law is a new model for how community groups and labor can work together to rebuild cities.

Local hiring is a job creation tool. A guaranteed 20 to 30 percent of these jobs for taxpayers in our local communities over the next couple years was enough to win. This is just the beginning of the opportunities that the local hiring law has created.

Pack the courtroom -- Dept. 12 at 850 Bryant -- at 1:30pm today for the arraignment on bogus charges of DeBray Carpenter, better known as Fly Benzo, resistance leader in Bayview Hunters Point. Public Defender Jeff Adachi has assured he will be well represented, but he needs and deserves a crowd of supporters too. Fly is the keynote speaker Saturday at the October 22nd rally to stop police brutality. The mayor is in charge of the police department. Hold Mayor Ed Lee accountable for this attempt to silence a community leader. Call him at (415) 554-6141. Free Fly Benzo!

Contrary to Mayor Ed Lee’s claim in a press release issued yesterday by the Mayor’s Office, the Superior Court issued an important victory for Bayview environmental health advocates by blocking the proposed early transfer of the toxic parcels of the Hunters Point Superfund site.

On the corner of Third and Revere, where the Bayview Library used to be, nothing is left but bare ground. One of the few places in the neighborhood where youngsters felt safe and enriched and everyone was welcome is gone. If the City had allowed the low bidder to build the new library, it would have been at least halfway to completion by now. The youngsters who love the library would be watching their parents and older brothers and sisters build a beautiful new library for them to return to in a matter of months. Liberty Builders, my general contracting company, was that low bidder.

Dennis Herrera should apologize to the African American community, to Mohammed Nuru and to Mayor Lee and he should immediately resign. He cannot be a candidate for mayor and the city attorney, who is supposed to represent Mohammed Nuru.

In the face of the U.S. power structure’s continuing attempts to force communities of color to hide in our own hoods, a 19-year-old Afrikan youth, Kenneth Harding, was shot to death Saturday over not having a transfer for a $2 light rail ride. As he lay dying in a pool of his own blood, reaching out for help, raising himself up and crying out in agony, only to be surrounded and circled by police who were armed to the teeth with assault rifles and other tools of war ...

A crowd of over 200 community advocates, elected officials, labor leaders, community contractors and City department heads came together on Feb. 23 to celebrate the passage of the historic local hiring ordinance.