Progressives illiterates. Period. They created a ballot measure to tax amazon out of San Fran. Instead, the measure as written would not harm Amazon, just small businesses in San Fran.
“On Friday, a judge will decide whether Prop. K—designed to tax Amazon and channel roughly $60 million a year into a guaranteed income program for the city’s most vulnerable residents—should go before voters in November.
In true San Francisco fashion, Prop. K might have been crafted with noble intentions, but it has since blown up in the face of its backers. It was intended to tax Amazon and perhaps some other large e-commerce companies. But because the authors apparently misunderstood both Amazon’s business and the nature of many local enterprises, Prop. K would instead ding hundreds of bars, restaurants and small brick-and-mortar retailers while draining millions from the general fund.”
Like everything else done by the Progressives, it has economically harmed the town—forcing many to flee California for their own sanity, safety and economic survival.
How an SF Housing Nonprofit Blew Almost $500K on a Flawed Effort To ‘Tax Jeff Bezos’ Ass’
Written by Josh Koehn, SF Standard, 9/1/22
John Elberling’s face is unshaven. His hair: unshorn. And his heart: unrepentant.
The longtime boss of TODCO—the South of Market affordable housing organization that’s morphed into a power player in city politics—is leaning over a beer at the 5th and Mission lounge Executive Order as he defends Proposition K, his half-million-dollar election blunder.
“So what?” Elberling said. “Because you might make a mistake, you shouldn’t do anything? That’s their argument? Yeah, well, fuck that.”
On Friday, a judge will decide whether Prop. K—designed to tax Amazon and channel roughly $60 million a year into a guaranteed income program for the city’s most vulnerable residents—should go before voters in November.
In true San Francisco fashion, Prop. K might have been crafted with noble intentions, but it has since blown up in the face of its backers. It was intended to tax Amazon and perhaps some other large e-commerce companies. But because the authors apparently misunderstood both Amazon’s business and the nature of many local enterprises, Prop. K would instead ding hundreds of bars, restaurants and small brick-and-mortar retailers while draining millions from the general fund.
“I never imagined that their cloud services or Prime video are more revenue than all the stuff I buy from them,” Elberling said. “I never imagined that to be true.”
He added, “The bill was written thinking: ‘How do we tax Jeff Bezos’ ass?’”
Elberling and others now realize their error and are hoping the court will remove the measure from the ballot. But if the decision doesn’t go that way, the result could be a new tax that no one supports.
“At this point, we all have a shared concern that it might pass,” said Sharky Laguana, president of the city’s Small Business Commission. “If it stays on the ballot, we all have to run a campaign against it.”
That is, everyone except Elberling.
While he may have spent $360,000 in TODCO funds on the ballot measure and racked up $90,000 in bills before legal fees to remove the monster that is Prop. K, the 75-year-old in a Grateful Dead hat and Warriors T-shirt seems to take a certain glee in the criticism. Elberling rejects the idea that he should fund a counter-effort to kill it. Instead, TODCO—short for Tenants and Owners Development Corporation—and its political partners will simply channel their efforts into repealing and replacing the measure in next year’s election if it passes.
“Running a ‘no’ campaign? I mean, seriously, that I would be uncomfortable with—that’s just too fucking cute by half,” Elberling said. “You just say, ‘You know what, we fucked up. It didn’t come out the way we wanted to.’ Now we know that. Now we’re going to fix it. Now we’re going to get it right.”
Nightmare on Stevenson Street
The Prop. K fiasco is the latest political controversy embroiling TODCO, an organization that solidified its reputation as a menace to many in local housing circles when it played a pivotal role in the Board of Supervisors’ decision to kill a 495-unit housing project on Stevenson Street.
Supervisors raised numerous arguments against the 27-story apartment tower, some clearly specious, but it was Elberling and TODCO who prodded the board to reject it for a laundry list of concerns that ranged from gentrification to earthquake risks. The vote was widely seen as highly politicized and a form of payback to Elberling.
