Heather Knight and the Big Lie about the pandemic

Photo: Paul Chinn

City residents like to think of their city as a staunch defender of liberal values and progressive public policies. One of the things that prompted me to start this blog way back in 2004/2005 was challenging that assumption when that brand of liberalism clearly went astray.

Challenging that assumption is harder when the city's major daily newspaper in effect is a megaphone for City Hall: How the Chronicle failed San Francisco.

The Chronicle's Heather Knight's cartoon version of city politics:

San Francisco city officials and residents regularly bemoan the red tape and bureaucracy that make getting just about anything done at City Hall a headache-inducing experience. So what happened Monday when one simple proposal to repair one small facet of city operations finally came to the Board of Supervisors’ land-use committee for discussion six months after it was introduced? Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Dean Preston tabled it, refusing to send it to the full board for a discussion.

That "simple proposal" would require anyone who appealed a City Hall policy to first get 50 signatures to qualify, making it more difficult for citizens to challenge city policy. 

A status quo megaphone like Knight assumes that city policies should be more difficult for us peasants to challenge, since, you understand, City Hall knows best:

At issue was legislation from Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Matt Haney that would have made it impossible for one grumpy person to stop a city project if it’s important to public safety or health, if it can be reversed, or if it’s temporary. Instead, it would require 50 signatures or five supervisors to schedule an appeal hearing.

Take that, red tape and bureaucracy!

To simulate balance, Knight has to provide Supervisor Peskin's succinct refutation of her nonsense, which she deliberately mangles in her column{Later: I don't see any mangling here]:

“Fundamentally, this is a solution looking for a problem,” Peskin said, noting fewer than 20 appeals come to the Board of Supervisors each year and that lots of city officials spend lots of time replying to public records requests, but that doesn’t mean we should disallow them....Peskin also derided the whole topic as “the subject of however many articles in one Chronicle columnist’s thing, column”[sic].

I count at least five columns by Knight on this lie, though there may be more, since those five were so dumb I was compelled to blog about them. 

Those columns push the Big Lie that the pandemic medical emergency requires San Francisco to make radical changes to city streets to make it more difficult to drive and park here (see this, this, this, this, and this).

The Sierra Club also refutes Knight's obsession with this pseudo-issue:

One reason given for modifying the CEQA appeals process in San Francisco is that the number of appeals has been a burden to City government, both in terms of time and finances. 

However, over the last five years, CEQA appeals in San Francisco comprised only .5% (or ½ of 1 %) of all the categorical exemptions; this is not an onerous burden for City government. 

In addition, despite inquiries to the City, no actual facts have been provided that show this is a financial burden for a City budget of over $13.7 Billion. In fact, the impact of environmentally-damaging projects can be much more costly in the long run, both in terms of remediation and, even more importantly, impacts on human and environmental health.