From the President

The Importance of November's Election

by Eric Andresen

The upcoming election is an incredibly important one for the SFAA. As you surely know by now we, as an industry, are firmly entrenched in a battle over the Hetch Hetchy Water Bond and the Affordable Housing Bond. The Water Bond, if passed, will create a substantial expense for each of you, for it will prevent you from recouping the costs from the tenants who will actually make up the majority of the vote on this bond issue. Both initiatives continue to allow unsupervised spending of taxpayer dollars with absolutely no requirement for reporting, auditing or careful management.

Over the past decade, we have been quite successful in convincing regulators to heed our threat that we will defeat any bond measure that prevents us from passing costs onto our tenants. The basis for our broad opposition is quite simple: the tenants, with a majority of the vote, should be required to pay for any legislation they approve at the voting booth.

The current crop of legislators obviously has not learned from their predecessors. While they have agreed to allow a 50 percent passthrough of bond costs, their actions today reveal they have little respect and an obvious disregard for those of us in the housing industry. How quickly they seem to forget that we do hold a substantial financial interest in this community and won’t tolerate the games they consistently play.

That’s why this election is vitally important, and it is imperative that all of you do everything in your power to support our campaigns and get our message out to the people. The gross unfairness of giving tenant “users” of water an opportunity to vote and approve an expense they themselves will never have to pay should be obvious to everyone—legislators and voters alike. Approval of this measure will ensure a tripling of the water charges on your bill. This utterly unfair charge occurs at the same time that a sewer service rate hike is coming down the pike. Yes, the Hetch Hetchy system is in desperate, even criminal need of repair, but not at the expense of the housing industry. There are far better ways to ensure reasonable repairs at a fair and equitable cost.

We are similarly incensed by the Affordable Housing initiative. In the case of this bond issue, we are immensely concerned over the total lack of oversight and accountability of the money once it has been handed over to the special-interest affordable-housing developers. In 1996, $100 million dollars was handed over to these folks and, to this day, no one really knows how this money was used. We certainly don’t have much new housing, or they wouldn’t be coming back to us again. By defeating this measure, we will send a strong message not only regarding the fairness of the repayment process but also indicating we are sick and tired of special-interest individuals wasting our valuable tax dollars.
We are also quite interested in the outcome of the various Supervisorial races, the HOPE initiative (to allow tenants more opportunities for home ownership), and the homeless measures. The SFAA Political Action Committee is preparing a full-slate card with their endorsements (see page 7 for these endorsements). I encourage each of you to thoroughly review the positions that our PAC recommends.

So much hangs on the outcome of this election. With your strong support, we will prevail and thus send an unmistakable message to local and state representatives that we will not tolerate their slipshod and inequitable approach to spending our money. Our obvious message to them is that they must be more cautious and give greater consideration to future initiatives.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or the SF Apartment Magazine. Eric Andresen owns West Coast Property Management and West Coast Property Maintenance Companies, is the past-president of the Professional Property Management Association of San Francisco and was the author of the original Residential Tenancy Agreement. Eric also serves on the Executive Board of the California Apartment Association and many other leading industry organizations. Questions or concerns should be directed to SFAA at 415-255-2288. © Copyright 2002.