Supes weigh moving staff out of squalid Hall of Justice
For decades, the complaints have piled up. Mice. Cockroaches. Asbestos. Sewage dripping down into offices from clogged toilets in the seventh-floor jail.
But Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting could mark the beginning of the end of these travails for everyone working in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant St. The board will vote on whether to approve a $150 million, 15-year lease on a Potrero Hill office building, as well as two letters of intent to rent property in the South of Market.
Those agreements would enable the district attorney’s office, adult probation department and police investigations unit to move out of the Hall of Justice on July 1.
Hall of Justice employees and their unions are exhorting the supervisors to approve
those leases, saying the building’s inhabitants can no longer tolerate the vile conditions. Yet several supervisors have criticized the property deals, saying the city should look for something better.
“One hundred fifty million dollars over 15 years is an exorbitant price tag, in my opinion,” said Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who tried to block the lease agreement for 350 Rhode Island St.— a suite of offices proposed for the district attorney — when it went before the board’s Budget and Finance Committee on Thursday. The three committee members — Supervisors Malia Cohen, Katy Tang and Norman Yee — moved it forward despite Safaí’s objections.
Safaí said he wanted the city to buy, rather than rent, new facilities. He even suggested seizing office buildings through the power of eminent domain — a lengthy, lastresort process usually reserved for major infrastructure like the Transbay Terminal.
Supervisor Aaron Peskin shares Safaí’s concerns and said that generally he would rather purchase property than sign a lease.
“Markets change over time,” Peskin said. He noted that if the country enters a recession in three years, rents could plummet, but San Francisco would still be locked into a $150 million agreement that it signed when rents were high.
Board President London Breed raised similar concerns, chiding city real estate officials for not “exploring all options.”
“I get that there’s an urgency to get everyone out of the Hall of Justice,” Breed said. “But from my perspective, this is a lot of money.”
Such arguments grate on law enforcement staff who work in the hall — a giant,
59-year-old, bunker-like building with frequent plumbing leaks, broken elevators, power failures, sewage floods, pests, asbestos-laden walls and toxic lead paint. Its execrable conditions led most of the city’s public employee unions to file grievances this year and resulted in a complaint from the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health.
If a 7.9-magnitude earthquake were to strike the San Andreas Fault, more than 100 people would die at the hall, according to an analysis that the city did this year using hazard-assessment software provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“It’s incredibly reckless to leave thousands of people in a building that is literally doomed in the next major earthquake,” said Max Szabo, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office. “If this facility is still occupied when (the quake) hits, the financial costs that the city will incur are massive, and the human costs will be horrific. But both will have been preventable.”
Despite their public remarks, Safaí Peskin and Breed declined to say whether they would oppose the leases at Tuesday’s board meeting. And it wasn’t clear whether they could rally enough votes to kill the proposals.
Other supervisors expressed support for the leases after receiving a pointed Oct. 16 memo from City Administrator Naomi Kelly, who gave a clinical description of the squalor at 850 Bryant St. and noted the 100 deaths that would be on San Francisco’s hands if a major earthquake hits.
Supervisor Jeff Sheehy worked in the Hall of Justice from 1998 to 2000 as an advocate for same-sex domesticviolence survivors and hatecrime victims under former District Attorney Terence Hallinan. Even then, he said, “conditions were deplorable.”
He vividly remembers how a colleague left her coat hanging on the back of a chair for a few hours, and came back to find a dead mouse in the pocket.
Earlier this year, Sheehy requested a budget and legislative analyst’s report to estimate how much money San Francisco could save by clearing out the hall next year and moving into the three leased spaces. The report, published in June, predicted the city would save $95 million by renting property, rather than purchasing land and constructing new stand-alone facilities for its various departments.
Ultimately, the city plans to vacate and demolish the building and construct a new one in its place. If that happens before the lease terms are up, the city could rent the building at 350 Rhode Island St. to another tenant, budget and legislative analyst director Severin Campbell said at the committee meeting Thursday.
If the board does not approve the leases, it will put the city at risk not only for lives lost in an earthquake, but for any harm to the hundreds of employees, inmates, and San Francisco residents who use the Hall of Justice every day, said Bob Muscat, chair of the San Francisco Labor Council’s Public Employee Committee.
Muscat hinted that the unions might have to take legal action against the city if the Board of Supervisors does nothing.
“It’s disheartening to see a couple of supervisors try to take a new angle when this has been kicked around for so many years,” he said.