Economist.com Cities Guide: San Francisco Briefing - July 2006

News this month

Medicine for all

San Francisco wants to become America's first city to provide health care for all of its residents. This benefit is particularly for those who earn too much money to qualify for federal assistance, such as Medicaid, but are put off health insurance by the cost. The new plan, proposed by Gavin Newsom, the mayor, would not offer insurance though, and patients would only be able to use medical services in the San Francisco area.

Paying for the estimated 82,000 uninsured residents would probably cost about $200m a year. The city would cover most of this, but recipients would still pay premiums, and Tom Ammiano, a city supervisor, has suggested that businesses that don't already offer employees health insurance should help pay for the plan. Mr Newsom argues that the proposal would cut health-care costs in the long run by promoting regular health check-ups. If the plan is adopted, it could be a model for cities throughout the country and boost the political profile of Mr Newsom, who is mentioned as a future candidate for the Senate.

A new star rises

On June 6th the people of Oakland elected Ron Dellums, a former congressman and one of America’s best-known progressive black politicians, to be their mayor. Unsatisfied with the crop of local contenders, a group of citizens persuaded Mr Dellums to return to his native city from Washington, DC, where he had been working as a lobbyist. He says he is confident about taking up where Jerry Brown, his predecessor, left off, but sceptics worry, as they did with Mr Brown, whether he will be able to transfer his experiences working on a larger political stage to the day-to-day challenges of running a city.

During his eight-year tenure Mr Brown—a former governor of California who stood three times for the Democratic presidential nomination—used his political star power to give Oakland a needed boost. On his watch the economy improved, home and office construction boomed, and the city’s famously high murder rate dropped (though it has been inching back up). He is now campaigning to become California’s attorney general.

Going, going, Gonzales

Ron Gonzales, the mayor of San Jose, has refused to step down, despite being voted out by an 8-3 majority of the city council. He is not legally obligated to go, according to laws cited by Richard Doyle, the city's attorney, though the council has the power to dock his pay. The furore arose after the mayor's indictment in late June on corruption charges stemming from a secretly negotiated waste contract. Mr Gonzales has proclaimed his innocence on six charges, which include bribery and misappropriation of funds, and said he is determined to serve out his second term, which ends on January 1st.

Innocent or not, Mr Gonzales is witnessing the demise of his once bright political future. In 1998 he became the first Hispanic mayor of San Jose, the 10th-largest city in America. Two years later he addressed the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles and was mentioned as a future candidate for state office. But his ethics came into question when he was forced to admit to an extramarital affair with a 25-year-old subordinate, whom he later married. And it was in 2000 when he and his top budget aide, Joe Guerra (who was also charged in the indictment), negotiated a secret deal to give Norcal Waste Systems, the city’s rubbish contractor, an additional $11.25m in public funds to cover increased labour costs. They neglected to inform the city council, a lapse which has now led to a full-blown scandal and criminal investigation that could send Mr Gonzales to prison for eight years.

Keeping the cash

For nearly three decades, Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, a Bay Area company, has battled with Microsoft’s Bill Gates for bragging rights in the world of high technology. But in the contest to be the greatest living philanthropist, Mr Ellison lags some way behind. In late June, he announced that he would not be giving $115m to Harvard University to create an institute to study world health, as he had suggested. The donation would have been the largest in the university’s history, but Mr Ellison decided against the largesse after Harvard’s president, Larry Summers, resigned over comments he made about women's aptitude for maths and science. Mr Ellison apparently considered Mr Summers integral to the institute. His announcement came shortly after Mr Gates said he planned to give away the bulk of his $50 billion fortune and devote himself full time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims to eliminate global poverty and disease.

University death

Denice Denton was a crusading female engineer and chancellor of the University of California's (UC) 15,000-student campus in Santa Cruz. But in what the school has described as a “tremendous loss”, she committed suicide on June 24th, throwing herself from a block of flats in San Francisco. She was apparently depressed and struggling with work and health problems.
The youngest chancellor of a UC campus, Ms Denton gained renown for confronting Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard University, over comments he made about women's mathematical aptitude. But soon after her arrival at Santa Cruz in February 2005, she became mired in a scandal over perks for top UC managers. She was criticised for requesting $600,000 in university-funded renovations to her campus residence and for obtaining a UC administrative job and a $50,000 housing allowance for her partner, Gretchen Kalonji. At the time of her suicide, Ms Denton had been grappling with a severe thyroid condition and was on medical leave.

Catch if you can

July 2006

The Bancroft Library at 100: a Celebration 1906-2006

Until December 3rd 2006

Scores of books, papers and historical materials from Latin America and the American West were almost destroyed in 1906, when a great earthquake set fire to San Francisco. Hubert Howe Bancroft, a writer and ethnologist who settled in San Francisco in 1852, had amassed a vast library in San Francisco’s Mission district, and his was one of the few buildings to survive the disaster. The University of California at Berkeley, which had already bought Bancroft’s holdings, ferried the collection across the bay for safekeeping.

A century on, UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library boasts one of the largest collections of rare books and manuscripts in America. This year the library celebrates its big anniversary with an exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum, featuring a rotating display of journals, letters and books covering 3,000 years of history, as well as maps, oral histories, prints and photographs. Highlights include a 16th-century Aztec scroll; the gold nugget claimed to have sparked California’s Gold Rush; two of Mark Twain’s unpublished notebooks; and papers belonging to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Maxine Hong Kingston, two of California’s literary luminaries.

Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. Tel: +1 (510) 642-0808. Open: Wed-Sun 11am-5pm (Thurs until 7pm). For more information, visit the exhibit’s website.

More from the San Francisco cultural calendar