Court tells Breed: no ‘mayor’ on ballot title
San Francisco Supervisor London Breed will no longer be described as the city’s “acting mayor” when she runs for the top seat in June.
Breed will now be identified as “president, Board of Supervisors” in all voter pamphlets and materials for the June 5 ballot, according to an order and stipulation that will be heard in San Francisco Superior Court Tuesday. It settles a lawsuit filed by one of Breed’s opponents, Mark Leno, who said the acting-mayor title was misleading.
Leno, Breed and Deputy City Attorney Jon Givner all agreed to the change and signed the agreement Monday.
San Francisco’s election rules require candidates to list the jobs they hold on the day of filing deadline, which was Jan. 9 in this case. Breed was serving as acting mayor and as the Board of Supervisors president at that time. She was ousted from the mayor’s office two weeks later, when six of her board colleagues voted to install Mark Farrell
as interim mayor.
Leno, a former state assemblyman and senator, is designated on the ballot as a “small businessman.”
Leno’s campaign spokesman, Jim Stearns, expressed satisfaction with the order and took the opportunity to criticize Breed for taking money from independent expenditure committees. Leno disavowed donations from such committees in January and has made financial transparency the centerpiece of his campaign. He persistently badgers Breed on social media, urging her to join him.
“Now that Breed has withdrawn her attempt to deceive voters using the ballot, maybe she’ll take a second look at the dishonest Super PACs supporting her candidacy and denounce, renounce and reject all Super PACs,” Stearns said in a statement, referring to committees that accept unlimited funds and may obscure their origin.
Breed spokeswoman Tara Moriarty said the supervisor had always been willing to change her ballot designation.
“Let’s get back to the real issues facing the city,” she said.
— Rachel Swan
Early Days no more: A controversial sculpture in San Francisco’s Civic Center that critics call a racist celebration of the subjugation of American Indians by European colonists will be taken down, following a unanimous vote by the city’s Arts Commission on Monday.
The sculpture, titled “Early Days,” is one of five bronze statues that make up the Pioneer Monument between the Main Library and the Asian Art Museum. It depicts a vaquero and a missionary standing over a fallen and nearly naked Indian man. It’s been the subject of fierce debate for decades, but a renewed push to remove the sculpture surged after the deadly demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., last year at the site of a Confederate statue.
The Arts Commission voted to begin the process of removing the statue last October, but it needed the support of the city’s Historic Preservation Commission to move forward because the sculpture is located in a historic district. The preservation commission blessed the request to remove the statue, but with the condition that a plaque be installed in its place to let passersby know why it was taken away.
Just before the vote, Arts Commission President J.D. Beltran said the statue’s critics were justifiably offended by its presence in a public square because “it signals a municipality’s implicit endorsement of the racism with the statue.” Putting the sculpture in a museum, where it would be surrounded by other artifacts of history, would nullify that endorsement, she said.
Where the statue will be stored is not yet clear, but Kate Patterson-Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Arts Commission, said it would be removed sometime this year. Tom DeCaigny, San Francisco’s director of cultural affairs, said the commission has already received inquiries from museums and other institutions about housing the statue.
The Arts Commission estimates the cost of removing the sculpture — a process that will require a sculpture conservation specialist and a crane — at $160,000 to $200,000.
“This statue coming down is huge for the Native American community, not just in San Francisco, but around the country,” said Mariposa Villaluna, who organized a citizens’ campaign to bring the statue down.
— Dominic Fracassa