Breed is sole mayoral candidate on U.S. senator’s radar
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she may stay out of the San Francisco mayor’s race, but she plans to meet with one candidate — Supervisor London Breed — later this week.
“I haven’t met with any of the others,” Feinstein told The Chronicle’s editorial board on Tuesday. “I don’t know that I will become involved.”
Feinstein served two terms as mayor from 1978 to 1988. She rose to power during a historic moment that in some ways resembles the current special election: Mayor George
Moscone was fatally shot in City Hall, and Feinstein, who was then president of the Board of Supervisors, filled his seat until the special election.
Some consider Feinstein an antecedent to Breed, the current board president, who took over as acting mayor after Mayor Ed Lee died
of a heart attack in December. Among Breed’s most fervent supporters is Feinstein ally Willie Brown, who is also a former mayor and a Chronicle columnist. He arranged this week’s meeting between Feinstein and Breed.
“When I first ran, the only public official to support me was Willie Brown,” Feinstein said. “Willie has asked me to talk to her, and so I’m very happy to do it,” she added, referring to Breed. “And we’ll see what happens.”
Feinstein said she is also familiar with mayoral candidate Mark Leno, a veteran politician whom Brown appointed to the Board of Supervisors in 1998. He went on to serve 14 years as an assemblyman and state senator.
The senator said she is less familiar with the other leading challengers, Supervisor Jane Kim and former Supervisor Angela Alioto.
— Rachel Swan Breed wants answers: San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is ratcheting up the pressure on Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to explain why the utility is imposing seemingly arbitrary technical requirements on dozens of city projects, resulting in months of delays and enormous cost overruns.
On Tuesday, Board President London Breed sent a tersely worded letter to PG&E President and CEO Geisha Williams expressing her “deep concern” over recent reports that PG&E was requiring that city affordable housing developments, recreation spaces and public safety facilities be built to handle electricity loads far beyond what they actually required.
City law requires that new municipal developments automatically become power customers of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which powers municipal buildings with 100 percent renewable energy. That policy was put in place thanks to a 2014 ordinance Breed passed with then-Supervisor Scott Wiener. But PG&E owns the transmission lines that distribute that energy, which gives the company a degree of leverage over the city on electricity issues.
City officials say that new projects have ground to a halt as designers and engineers work to meet PG&E’s technical requirements. Construction delays and increased costs can add hundreds of thousands — and in some cases, millions — of taxpayers dollars to a project’s costs.
“It is simply unacceptable that PG&E would alow public projects to be weighed down with extra cost and unnecessary delays,” Breed wrote.
More concerning, she said, was the possibility that the utility company was imposing its requirements in response to Breed and Wiener’s law. Privately, many officials grumble that as the city hooks up more customers to its own power supplies, PG&E is throwing up roadblocks out of sheer competition.
It’s “alarming,” Breed said, “that the passage of our 2014 ordinance could have in any way triggered PG&E to heighten its requirements for how these projects connect to the power grid.” Besides asking for PG&E’s response on the matter, Breed also wrote that she would be asking the city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office to study whether “there has been a shift” in practice regarding how our public projects are treated by PG&E.”
Seperately, last month, Supervisor Hillary Ronen called for a public hearing to learn more about how PG&E’s technical requirements are impacting city projects. That hearing will take place before the board’s Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee and will probably happen in early May, one of Ronen’s aides said.