In anticipation of the San Francisco mayoral election, The Epoch Times is interviewing the mayoral candidates. This article is the first in a series. View the whole series HERE.
San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos represents District 11 of the city. He has a background in social work with degrees from UC Santa Barbara and San Francisco State University. After first serving as a legislative aide to Supervisor Chris Daly in 2005, he was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2008 where he served as Chair of the Budget and Finance Committee. An abridged version of this interview was first published on July 28, 2011 in the San Francisco print edition.
The Epoch Times: When did you begin to be interested in public service?
John Avalos: I really got interested in public service back in the mid-90s. I was always doing a lot of work in non-profit organizations and supporting communities but I really got involved in public service from a city government side back in 1996. I was an intern; I was in social work school at the time. I was an intern at Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. We were involved in helping children and their families—making sure City Hall was working for them... bringing people together to talk about the needs for child care, for afterschool programs, or youth employment programs. We talked about how we could influence people in City Hall to make sure we get funding for these programs so that we could have a better future for children, youth, and families.
From that experience… I have a lot of skills bringing people together and making City Hall more accountable to our communities.
ET: Would you have imagined at the time that you’d be working in City Hall?
JA: I thought it was possible but most of all I just really enjoyed the work of organizing, bringing people together. And that to me was the most important part, that for me... being in politics is really about how communities can help shape their own neighborhoods. They can make sure they have the services that we need. That’s first and foremost what it’s about—bringing people together, deciding together as a group what we need and what we should fight for.
Later I got to see that it’s important to have people in office that can be accessible and responsive to community and neighborhood groups that come together and want to influence City Hall.
ET: At that time, what’s something you did that has made you proud, made a good impact on people?
JA: Youth employment. I was working in the 90s with young people and we were losing from the federal government and the state government a lot of funding for youth employment opportunities. With young people we were able to go to City Hall, have hearings, have legislation we promoted that were able to get more funding locally to make up for the lack of funding that came from the state and the federal government. From the experience I saw that young people got really excited about their involvement in politics, how they could actually make a difference by going to City Hall and making things work on their behalf and I saw that it was important that you have people who could be a bridge between City Hall and community groups. That’s what I see myself as—a bridge to help bring City Hall and community groups together.
ET: What is the specific thing that amazed you that made you want to be mayor?
JA: I have about six, seven years of experience at City Hall so I knew City Hall very well. As chair of the budget committee I helped close twice in a row, $500 million budget deficits. I’ve worked on legislation; I’m very well respected at City Hall. I wasn’t thinking about being mayor. I really started thinking about it when I saw City Hall change in a way that was not accessible as I thought it could be for our communities. I made a run for President of the Board of Supervisors and I lost. When I saw the change, not just about losing but about where I thought City Hall was moving, I thought it would be really important to have someone who has a really neighborhood focus to be in the mayor’s office and be in a high level position in City Hall. That’s when I decided to run.
But I also needed to find people who wanted to support me in running. It wasn’t just my idea. I needed to go to my friends and community organizations that I’ve worked with over the years and see if they were interested in it. So it took me a few months to really come together—a lot of people to decide the right thing to do for me. I didn’t want [my] name up saying I’m going to run; I want you to support me. I wanted to bring people together in saying—does it make sense that we work together on a campaign where we can change City Hall and we can support my effort to be mayor.
I heard after a few months that people were starting to think that we could do it, that we could have a people’s movement to elect a mayor in San Francisco who will really look after neighborhoods and brings neighborhoods into City Hall to help make changes.
ET: What is your experience in City Hall that helps your effort of running for mayor?
JA: I think it’s about the kind of politics that I do. I believe in being collaborative in my approach to government and my idea is not what I can do for you but what we can do together in City Hall. And that’s kind of what I bring—in terms of working on the budget, in terms of working on legislation… that’s a rare thing to have in City Hall—someone who’s really looking out, not necessarily for things… but the future of our city and our neighborhoods and having a stake in the process in City Hall. That’s what I wanted to continue to do. When I worked on legislation last year for establishing our local hiring policy for residents, I got contractors together—big contractors… Asian contractors, Latino contractors, African American contractors. But also the Asian community, the black community, and white community, and Latino community and all together a coalition to pass the legislation. It was very hard to pass it. But what it’s really about making sure… listening to what people have to say, finding that common ground, and understanding of what we all share together. To craft a piece of legislation that creates very meaningful change and that’s going to help local residents get jobs in a local construction industry. That’s something that I think is a really great example of how I can be a real strong mayor that brings people to the table and gets the work done.
ET: What are the challenges?
JA: I think it’s really important that you listen, you have respectful relationships, and everyone who comes to City Hall has very important understandings from their own perspective and it’s important to understand the different perspectives that are there and then try and find ways that people can find common ground. I think a lot of it is my social work background. As a social worker we learn to listen rather than talk. But I need to talk endlessly now that I’m in public office, because you have to do both. But listening is a big part of our work as legislators. If we really want to legislate in a way that’s responsible for the city, in a way that really makes people feel that their voice really matters, then we can make a real difference. It’s not just changes that are happening to them but changes they can help make themselves.
ET: As mayor, what will be the top three things that you will do?
JA: I want to make San Francisco a livable city. I want to reserve our diversity. Make sure we have housing, education services, and good transit that make San Francisco livable. I want to make sure that the city government is accountable to us. City government that is accessible, that provides the ability for people to participate in our government. I want to make sure we can improve… to make San Francisco really the best it can be. How we can be open to sharing information about decision making in City Hall—that’s very important. Another thing is jobs—I want to make sure we can expand jobs in San Francisco. We need to look at it from the private sector, from the public sector. I have some ideas about how we can embolden our education program and meet our employment needs. I also look at how people look at our effective taxation to promote jobs as well, especially small businesses, which are the backbone of job creation… I don’t think we have a city that fully looks at our commercial corridors the way we really need to. I see a lot of empty store fronts in the city, merchants who are really struggling to make their business work. They need more attention to make their businesses work. They need more attention from City Hall. How can we encourage our banks to do more investment locally to help stimulate our economy? These are the things I want to do as mayor.
ET: Do you have any specific plan to create jobs?
JA: One is looking at our banking industry—how banks can make more local investments to help stimulate small businesses. I’ve done some things in my district with residents. We put on artwalk events that bring people down to our commercial corridors to look at art that our neighborhood residents make. We have empty storefronts we filled up with art. We only did that four nights… I want to have a plan for all of our commercial corridors to do that on a regular basis.
We have residents we can tap into… [There] are online travel companies to book a hotel room through online services. Websites like Travelocity don’t pay the hotel tax. No one pays the hotel tax. I want to make sure that we can collect that hotel tax that everyone should pay for. We can use that hotel tax to cover our art events, for our parks.
ET: Can you elaborate on taxation?
JA: As Chairman of the Budget Committee I’ve brought in this year so far, $40 million more than last year. I’ve put on the ballot a measure that would increase the real estate transfer tax when property changes hands, you would pay a higher amount on properties that are over $5 million and over $10 million. So it really affects people who have a lot of commercial real estate, very expensive buildings and not people who are single family home owners. That’s how I want to look at taxation; I want to make sure that as we’re balancing our budgets, making them more efficient, we’re also looking at progressive ways of taxing. So we’re not taxing everyday San Franciscans who can’t afford to pay for it but people who have more wealth and are able to share that wealth to make sure that our city can maintain its level of services, we can maintain our infrastructure. We can maintain the infrastructure to support businesses and make sure we have a city that’s livable.
ET: Do you have any ideas to revive small businesses?
JA: I think it’s looking at banking. So we can encourage banks to do a greater investment and take more risks with money to support small businesses. I want to also figure out how we can get small businesses to work together to build an insurance that they need to do financing for loans for starting up their businesses. I think the city needs to have a much more robust program to support small businesses. We have a small business administration office. I think there’s about three staff who are there right now. We need more support in that direction. We’ve spent a lot of time supporting the biggest businesses in the city and the focus I hear of is over and over again from small businesses. I talk directly to a lot of Latino small businesses. They feel that they are not supported enough, left out. So we need language services that can meet the Chinese merchants effectively and the Latino merchants effectively. Without that we are not doing what we need to do, to really meet our economic needs and our diversity.
ET: With the city facing a budget crisis, how would you work on the budget?
JA: There are a lot of ideas around how we’re going to close our budget, the same ones that are around year after year. You cut jobs, you cut services, or you can raise revenue—that’s something that I’ve been looking at year after year, how we can raise revenue from progressive taxation. Right now wealth is accumulating into smaller and fewer and fewer hands. I want to make sure you can find ways to bring that wealth into our cities. We have to look at our contracts for labor. We can’t give away the store to labor organizations or unions… we have to make sure our union members are well-paid. But we cannot give 6.5 percent increases every year to the members because as a city we cannot afford that.
Back in 2007 Mayor Gavin Newsom approved a 6.5 percent increase to police and fire and we couldn’t afford it. We really need to look at our means in terms of negotiating contracts. I really believe in the work of humans but I want to make sure we can afford all the contracts we sign and approve. If we don’t do that we won’t be able to meet our needs to run this city.
Pension reform is another piece of this. Because of the market a lot of investments for our pension funds crashed; we have to pay our pension obligation out of the general fund. That’s a very difficult thing to do as a city. So I support the efforts… where we share the cost more between the city government and the workers. When our investment dollars get better, the workers will pay less of that cost. That’s going to help the city in the long run. If we do not fix our pension cost we know that we cannot balance our budget—we cannot have flexibilities to balance our budget without cutting a lot of jobs and cutting out services that San Franciscans rely on.
ET: Do you support Mayor Lee’s pension reforms?
JA: Currently I’m a co-sponsor of Mayor Lee’s reform measure. They call it a consensus approach. It’s almost a consensus approach. It’s a majority approach. There’s one union that hasn’t quite signed on yet. SEIU 10-1 has not signed on. I hope we will help support what their concerns are and form a true consensus approach. If the Mayor does not do that I might take my name off the measure. But I do believe we need to pass something that’s going to be able to help pay for our pension obligation, so we’re not cutting jobs, cutting services, and hurting our local residents.
ET: What do you think of public defender Jeff Adachi’s idea of pension reform?
JA: He’s putting forward his own measure. I would like that he just put that aside and go with the approach that I think is the right approach, that involves the input and work as a table between the city… Mr. Hellman was part of that effort in unions to come up with something with broader appeal. If there’s a difference in two measures, both could go down. We’re going [to have] major cuts in the future to be able to pay for our pension obligation. That’s something San Franciscans are not going to like. So I believe going with one measure is the way to go. I hope Jeff Adachi can find that’s the right way to go as well.
The fact that Sean Elsbernd is supporting the mayor’s version is significant. Sean is like a barometer for me on our pension cost. He’s been talking about that for years, on how our pension costs are going beyond what our government is willing to pay. And the fact that he supports the mayor’s measure means that it’s something that’s going to have significant cost savings. So we’re not blowing a hole in our general fund to pay for pension obligations.
ET: What is the difference between the two measures?
JA: The major difference is that there has been work together from different points of view to craft the mayor’s measure. Jeff Adachi has not had the input of unions, from a lot of stakeholders in government. It’s something that was crafted more separate from all those discussions. There’s no one signed up for that except Jeff Adachi and people who are funding the measure. That to me is not a broad enough approach to make a significant change in the city. There are other details that I’m not fully aware of about Jeff’s measure but to me to have one measure that has a broad support is the right way to go. We want to make sure we’re not spending a lot of money having one measure defeat the other, [it’s] not good for the city…
The fact that 95 percent of families support the mayor’s measure is significant.
ET: What will you do to improve transportation?
JA: We have to find a way to fix our funding for Muni. One idea that’s been up for a long time is how we can restore the vehicle license fee that was removed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. And there’s legislation being worked on at the state level, if it’s passed, it will allow San Francisco to be able to have its own vehicle license fee. That can go into looking at streets and also looking at transit so we can create a new funding stream to support transit.
The mayor also needs to be involved on a daily basis. Daily work at the mayor’s office to penetrate the bureaucracy of Muni to make sure it’s effective. You cannot rely on any one person. It’s a whole team approach to make sure that the directions coming from the general manager of the MTA responsible for Muni get carried out through all levels of the MTA and at the driver level.
That’s something a mayor who really cares about transit can make happen. I also think that we need to do much more to make sure transit is more productive, outside of the downtown of San Francisco. We talk about San Francisco being a transit-versed city, [but some areas] don’t have as many options. I want to make sure we have greater options for transit for those parts of San Francisco. We see our lightrail vehicles often don’t go down to the end of the line. If you live in the Outer Sunset, sometimes you get dropped off before the train gets to the end of the line. It’s a big inconvenience. It’s because the train is more for serving people downtown. It’s a big inconvenience. We need to make sure trains serve people throughout 35th avenue, 40th avenue… That doesn’t happen as it should. And a mayor who comes from the southern part of San Francisco would have a lot of good perspectives about how Muni can be improved. That’s what I want to do. It’d be a 24/7 operation for me—my involvement in Muni, as a mayor should. I’ll be a Muni rider mayor as well, because we need to have that perspective of the people if you want to make the right changes for the MTA.
ET: Do you foresee San Francisco being as transit-versed as New York?
JA: New York has many more options than we have. You have a much more vibrant subway system in New York, a much more vibrant bike system. But we need to make San Francisco as strong as it could be. I’d like to let lightrail be as good as our bus lines. We have a blueprint for doing that San Francisco transit project.
ET: Can you talk about the central subway project?
JA: The fact is the money we got from the state and federal governments are for specific purposes—for the central subway… The central subway goes through the densest part of, probably, the U.S. west of the Mississippi. I do believe that we’re going to have a high demand that’s going to continue. If we build it people are going to use it as well. I do have concerns about MTA’s ability to prevent cost overruns. They need to be well-managed and looked at with a great deal of extra accountability to make sure they’re meeting their targets for coming under budget.
How come we don’t have the kind of investments in transit that we need to have in other parts of San Francisco? The Balboa Park station—it’s in great need of repair. Right now we have 20,000 [people] who use it a day—the most used transit station outside the downtown area. The whole BART and Muni system outside downtown is very inconvenient for people.
As a supervisor I’ve already been focusing on that.
ET: What would you do to address these concerns?
JA: We can try and ensure we get the right funding from the state government, which is going to pay for transit as well. The mayor has a very strong voice; use that to push for looking at more progressive taxation and covering our costs for Muni. I want to bring the Muni plans together and draw the lines—what’s acceptable and what’ not. What I see in Muni now is that the general manager doesn’t even know what the plan is. One plan doesn’t know what the other plan is doing. So we need to make sure there’s greater unity and central purpose within the MTA to make sure everyone’s talking together and lining things up. That’s not happening. That’s one thing they haven’t had a mayor do in many years. I want to bring that type of management to the mayor’s office with the MTA.
ET: How would you connect education with employment needs?
JA: A few years ago we had high homicide rates. Mayor Newsom wanted to put extra money that came in for police overtime. I worked with communities to move that money to employment training programs. I worked with City College to create a biotech program, do more training for local San Franciscans to get into the biotech industry which was growing at the time. We also put money into media training so people can have more media skills—digital arts, digital media. We beefed up education programs to meet the needs of our local industry to make sure local San Francisco residents could get into jobs that are going to be created in those industries.
It’s really about creating pathways from our school district through City College into the private sector… a mayor who can help to strengthen the programs that currently exist there and to make sure we have a very streamlined communication between the different levels of government.
ET: How about the shortage of funding for public schools?
JA: I’ve been part of the effort to make sure our rainy day fund will be used to pay for our schools… I’m a parent; I have two kids in public school. My wife is also a teacher and so I’ve been part of making sure we have afterschool programs… childcare has also been a big concern of mine. Coming into school prepared [children] will have greater success later on.
