24 hr. Warning...To be Continued.

by TJ Johnston and PNN Staff

It didn’t exactly surprise fellow POOR Magazine supportive reporter, Laurie McElroy, or me when the Board of Supervisors once again put off deciding on important legislation: to have Department of Public Works give 24 hours notice before removing a person’s belongings. This legislation has a serious impact on the lives of San Francisco’s homeless citizens.

But before we could set foot on City Hall to view this legislative inertia, the building was evacuated because of a bomb scare, putting the regularly scheduled meeting on hold for about one half-hour.

In the interim, we strategized on street-level lobbying to get the DPW to place 24-hour tags on a person’s stuff. We even rehearsed a reworded Rolling Stones classic: “I Can’t Get No Notice Action” (we never got the chance to sing it). Then the bomb squad determined the infernal device to be a dud in this latest development of the five-year effort by several economic justice organizations, including the Coalition on Homelessness (COH).

The proposal cites, above all, the need to protect the homeless, a population historically at the short end of the stick. Kathleen Gray, a homeless woman and COH member, sees current practices as a catch-22. “When you have systems which gives people blankets and medicines, then turn around and take them away, (it) is not only wasteful of resources, it is also very debilitating.”

Gray emphasizes, “This legislation is about permitting people to own things, to accumulate things, to go beyond collecting bottles in a cart, to have some nice clothes to enable them to work a job.” Currently, this civil right (not to mention one’s possessions) is at risk.

“That right is self-empowering,” continues Gray, “and those who are self-empowered improve their lives. When their lives are improved, the neighborhood is improved.”

While the Supes listened to Falun Gong advocates, who were there in numbers, we visited the offices of five Board members including Sophie Maxwell and Leland Yee (initially, they supported the 24-hour advance warning, but have since backpedaled). We delivered a letter addressed to each supervisor thanking them “for their continued support” (fully realizing the irony of this phrasing).

Some of us even placed orange stickers of our cause on the doors. At the urging of the COH’s Mara Radar, we removed them immediately. Supervisor Tony Hall of the Rules Committee himself returned one of our stickers. He didn’t seem too pleased about it!

After tabling a resolution condemning Chinese persecution of the Falun Gong and deciding on other measures, the Board eventually kicked our locally based proposal back to the Rules Committee. This hearing is scheduled for Friday, Oct. 18.

In order for the measure to be adopted, six out of eleven Supervisors must vote yes; to override a likely mayoral veto, eight “yea” votes are required. Curiously, this body, one of the most progressive ones this city has seen, has just as much trouble arriving at a decision as previous Boards. After five years, where many have navigated mazes in often-futile efforts to retrieve their possessions, such a decision is long overdue.

(For more about this policy, see “Where’s My Stuff?” by Clive Whistle, on POOR News Network, 7/10/01.)