SPCA Clipped
Last month, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals announced that it was laying off 32 people, 11 percent of its staff. Two-thirds of the cuts were made to the nonprofit’s animal hospital, including veterinary assistants and registered veterinary technicians. The rest was associated with administrative positions, the shelter medicine program, including one veterinarian, and the department that runs the adoption center. It’s SPCA’s largest staff reduction in at least 15 years.
Parks and Wreck
San Franciscans are proud of our parks, particularly the shiny new and renovated ones that’ve emerged in Dogpatch and along the Central Waterfront, extending to India Basin. But there’s signs that municipal leadership over these spaces – particularly General Manager Phil Ginsburg – is past their prime and should find jobs more suitably sleepy. Ginsburg presided over the slow-moving corruption of the San Francisco Park Alliance, and oversees a department that finances itself, in part, by charging large amounts of overhead to “manage” park renovations, a similar, if legal, version of what felled the Alliance. He’s chronically neglected proper policing of or effective signage at Dolores Park, creating the conditions for such recent ugly incidents as the attack of University of California, Berkeley film professor Damon Young and allowing the space to be the stage for weeks of uncontrolled, dangerous, fireworks. Ginsburg has been at Parks and Rec for 14 years. That’s long enough.
Ice Cold
According to an undocumented construction worker who has periodic projects in San Francisco, last month United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Home Depot in San Rafael, picking up day labors waiting for work in the parking lot. The constructor worker hid in his car, with the knowledge that he could no longer purchase supplies at the hardware store, an integral part of his job… Is this really what Americans want: scaring, jailing and deporting people looking to work to feed their family? Perhaps it’s time to bring back and expand the Bracero Program, an agreement between the United States and Mexico, established in 1942, that permitted millions of Mexicans to work temporarily in the U.S., primarily in agriculture. Initially, the program addressed World War II labor shortages, but it continued until 1964. Not aid, labor trade!
