From: SF Gate
By Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross 1/21/15
San Francisco Board of Supervisors President London Breed has a pointed message for the African American community regarding gun crime: “When you know your kids are involved in this violence, let’s turn them in.”
“I know it’s not popular to say,” Breed told the crowd Monday at the King Day observance at Yerba Buena Gardens. But, she said, it’s essential “to save their lives and somebody else’s life.”
Her remarks came just days after four young African American men were gunned down in a stolen car at the corner of Laguna and Page streets, part of the Hayes Valley neighborhood that Breed represents on the board.
“If we are going to change the problems, we have to look inside our own homes and see if we have problems with our own children,” Breed told us of her tough-love stance.
Breed, who is African American and grew up in San Francisco’s public housing, speaks from personal experience — one of her brothers, who was drug addicted, is in prison for robbery and other crimes, and her younger sister died of a drug overdose a decade ago.
“When my brother was selling drugs and doing his thing out there (on the streets), my grandmother found some drugs and flushed them down the toilet,” Breed said. “She’s like, ‘This is not what’s going to happen in this house.’”
Social service programs and more police are part of the solution to break the cycle of violence, she said. “But we need to stop it completely, and part of that means holding ourselves accountable.”
Pathway to where? When Gov. Jerry Brown and University of California President Janet Napolitano sit down to go over UC’s finances, they might want to check out the university’s new $220 million payroll system that’s 18 months behind schedule and tens of millions of dollars over budget — with no solution in sight.
The new UCPath system is the centerpiece of the university’s “Working Smarter” cost-cutting campaign. It’s supposed to save UC between $80 million and $100 million annually by replacing the aging payroll and human resources system, which is now divided between the president’s office and UC’s 10 campuses, with a single operation in Riverside.
The idea was to have it up and running by 2014, cutting paychecks for the system’s 200,000 employees. But technical glitches keep popping up.
“We’re just not where we want to be yet,” said Steve Montiel, spokesman for the UC president’s office. “A payroll system is the type of thing you want to test and test and test to make sure you’ve got a good rate of accuracy.”
Right now, it looks like it will be 2017 before all campuses are on board. But UC tech insiders tell us they’re still waiting for higher-ups to give them a new launch date.
“It’s a great idea, but I don’t know if they can actually execute it,” said one techie assigned to the project, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak for the university.
If they can’t execute it, it won’t be for lack of funding. Montiel says UCPath has spent $170 million on staff, designing the software, and buying and outfitting a three-story building near UC Riverside.
We’ve heard the price tag could eventually hit $300 million. “It could be, or it could be more,” Montiel said. “It’s hard to know.”
As for who pays for it? A report prepared for the UC Board of Regents’ finance committee last year said only that campuses would share the cost, but that the money wouldn’t come from tuition or state operating costs.
Paybacks: The Contra Costa County Deputy Sheriffs Association has filed a federal lawsuit claiming that two members of the Board of Supervisors threatened the union with paybacks at the bargaining table for its support of a referendum to roll back the supes’ recent self-awarded pay raises.
Supervisors Karen Mitchoff and Mary Piepho told union reps that if deputies didn’t drop out of the effort to collect 40,000 signatures for a referendum to roll back the 33 percent pay hike, it would “end badly for you guys” and could lead to a “Chuck Reed-style” pension reform measure going before voters, according to the lawsuit.
Former San Jose Mayor Reed was a leader in the movement to reduce public-employee pensions.
According to the suit, in a subsequent phone call, Mitchoff told union labor representative Jim Bickert that she would “probably vote against” any pension-reform measure if the deputies withdrew their support for the petition drive.
The union didn’t do so, and the supervisors — faced with the likelihood that their pay hike (to $129,216, from $97,476) would go to the ballot — voted this month to rescind the raises.
A spokeswoman for Mitchoff said the supervisor had nothing to say about the lawsuit. Piepho did not respond to a request for comment.
