Election results
Coit Tower advisory measure wins: Proposition B, which was aimed at protecting the landmark’s mural, above, passes.
San Francisco’s 80-year-old garbage monopoly will continue as voters overwhelmingly rejected Proposition A, which would have changed the way the city handles trash collection.
Voters also approved Proposition B, an advisory measure that calls for strict limits on private events at Coit Tower and earmarking concession money for the city landmark.
Prop. A’s loss comes as no surprise. The measure was opposed by nearly every major politician in the city, as well as labor unions, business groups, environmentalists, community organizations and the Democratic, Republican and Green parties. Even the two men who put Prop. A on the ballot, retired Superior Court Judge Quentin Kopp and Potrero Hill activist Tony Kelly, agreed that they were facing an uphill climb.
“This is really a testament to the relationship between Recology and the voters,” said Gale Kaufman, a consultant for the opponents. The measure won easily with 76 percent of the vote. Prop. A was designed to break up the decades-old monopoly Recology has on residential and commercial trash collection in the city. A 1932 ordinance passed by the city’s voters exempted Recology’s predecessors from the city’s competitive bidding requirements.
The measure would have split the city’s lucrative garbage contract into five separate parts and banned any one company from holding all of them.
Opponents of the measure, bankrolled by $1.5 million in contributions from Recology, argue that the employeeowned company provides San Francisco with top-notch service at a reasonable cost.
The fight over Prop. B was a quieter affair, pitting a group formed to protect Coit Tower against local park supporters worried that a focus on the icon would funnel money away from other city parks.
Coit Tower should be a special case, argued the Protect Coit Tower Committee, because it’s both a symbol of the city and a facility that desperately needs restoration. Limiting private use of the landmark would put less stress on the building and its Depression-era murals, while the hundreds of thousands of dollars the city receives from concessions at Coit Tower each year should be spent there.
But the San Francisco Park Alliance and other opponents said the measure was too restrictive and that money from Coit Tower was needed to support parks across the city.
“The vote shows that people of the entire city, not just Nob Hill or Telegraph Hill, adore Coit Tower,” said Jon Golinger, a spokesman for the supporters. The advisory measure received 53 percent of the vote.
Last month, Mayor Ed Lee announced that the city would spend $1.7 million to repair Coit Tower and its murals.