Where's Gavin?

Today's video was inspired by the disappointing news that Gavin Newsom is chickening out of tomorrow's inaugural "Question Time" with the Board of Supervisors. But give the man credit, when he chickens out, he really chickens out--all the way to Switzerland.

While working on this video, we got to thinking about what it would be like if Gavin was actually going to abide by the will of the voters. Today would be Christmas Eve for San Francisco political junkies! Think about it. It would have been the first time Gavin faced public opposition since his last debate with Matt Gonzalez. The Mayor and Supervisors would be busily studying and preparing, and us working stiffs would be trying to arrange our work schedules so we could catch this historic occasion.

Instead it's just another manic Monday. The disconnect between the Supes and the Mayor remains unbridged, and the voters' thirst for public, meaningful dialog between our elected officials remains unquenched.

Here's some facts to back up our claims in the video:

• Google: The Chronicle on Gavin's cosy relationship with Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Oops, we forgot that Gavin only flew home on Air Google. Our apologies. He personally reimbursed Google $1,000 for the trip, although the Chronicle estimated "Newsom's share could have been more than $16,000."
• MUNI: On-time performance has hovered around 70% for the last four years. Gavin's response? More of the same. MUNI director Nathaniel Ford's response? Lower the on-time goal.
• Crime: We tried getting specifics on violent crime in San Francisco. But have you ever tried to extract meaningful, long-term data from the SFPD? Good luck. There's the decript and limited CrimeMAPS or there's sparse and user-unfriendly PDFs. That's it. So we're stuck with the FBI's report on violent crime in the first half of 2006, which Arthur Bruzzone projects as a 20% increase.
• Sidewalks and Streets: The grades are from the 2005 City Survey. Also of interest for you wonks out there is the Controller's 2005 Performance Report.’’