Rafael Mandelman

The State Senate Race Gets Interesting

Next year’s election to succeed termed-out State Senator Mark Leno has gotten a little more exciting, with Supervisor Jane Kim’s recent announcement that she will be running. She joins Supervisor Scott Wiener, who formally entered the race back in early July, but had been lining up his run since long before that. A visit to Wiener’s website shows that he has racked up endorsements from dozens of elected officials, including Mark Leno, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Fiona Ma and others from both San Francisco and San Mateo Counties. Add to that nearly twenty union locals and scores of community leaders.

Wiener, a former Chair of the local Democratic Party, has no doubt been working the Party endorsement process for some time, and I suspect that by now he may have it pretty well wrapped up. And, of course, he has had a significant head start in fundraising, having raised nearly a half million dollars, according to his campaign consultant Maggie Muir.

Kim is, however, formidable in her own right. An architect of the twitter tax break, she has cultivated a generally friendly relationship with the tech community, which could be helpful as she tries to match Wiener’s fundraising. And notwithstanding those tech connections, with former Assemblyman Ammiano declining to enter the race and supporting her instead, Kim is also likely to enjoy the support of a mostly-unified Left. If she can also unify the District’s Asian American communities behind her candidacy, Wiener’s path to victory could become significantly more difficult. Kim’s partisans suggest that her current situation is not so different from when she entered the District 6 Supervisor race against Debra Walker back in 2010. Then, Walker had already amassed an impressive list of endorsements and was generally viewed as the frontrunner. Kim won. She and her supporters are, of course, hoping for a repeat performance with Wiener in 2016 playing the role of Walker in 2010.

Our Queer Chancellor, Saving City College

As usual, I find myself in disagreement with several of the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club’s endorsements for this fall. Alice is for Julie Christiansen in District 3 and against Proposition’s F (the airbnb measure) and I (the so-called Mission Moratorium); regular readers know that I’m all in for Peskin and support both F and I. Nonetheless, I was delighted to attend the Club’s annual Fall Awards event at the Lookout on October 19, where the Club honored our out lesbian City College Interim Chancellor Susan Lamb. The honor was well deserved for a queer woman who has done so much in very a short time to stabilize such an important and imperiled institution. Lamb has one of the toughest jobs in San Francisco right now; she has to save our City College.

That’s no simple task. Though the College has been granted a temporary reprieve from the death sentence imposed by the accrediting commission, we are beginning to gear up for another accreditation visit in late 2016, and at that time we will have to demonstrate that we meet or exceed all accreditation standards, which turns out to be a tall order. At the same time, we are dealing with a decline in student enrollment approaching 40% over the last ten years.

Our student enrollment numbers are no longer in a free fall, as they were until recently, but we continue to decline, albeit at less catastrophic rates. Our full-time faculty members are the second lowest paid in the Bay Area, and our classified staff is paid significantly below their counterparts working for the City. We have had a revolving door of chancellors—five in the last four years—and we are having significant difficulty attracting and retaining high quality administrators at every level.

Tim Redmond has reported at 48hills.org about the administration’s plans to reduce our class schedule by 26% over the next five years (“City College Projects 26 Percent Class Cuts,” 10/19/15). Redmond and others have urged the Board and administration not to downsize the College, but the reality is this: the College has been downsized. No one in the current administration did this to us, but now they (Chancellor Lamb and her administration) and we (the Board of Trustees) have to deal with it. That means responsibly planning for the very real possibility that we may not recover our lost enrollment in time to avoid the State cutting our funding by tens of millions of dollars a year.

But it also means looking at areas where the College can grow, where there’s an unmet educational need that we can help fill. Happily, Lamb and her team are focused on that project. Unhappily, the lingering threat of disaccreditation is likely to continue to be a drag on the College at least until the accreditor issues its next report on the College in early 2017. Until then, unfortunately, rebuilding enrollment is going to be an uphill climb.

Rafael Mandelman is an attorney for the City of Oakland. He is also President of the City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees.