… Plus: Waymo and the Blue Angels, drones delivering packages—and why does the Chron care more about a team owner’s sex life than the horrifying, deadly working conditions on the field? That’s The Agenda for Aug. 30-Sept. 6
By Tim Redmond
August 30, 2026 (48hills.org)
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After ten years of organizing, supporters of a public bank in San Francisco will finally get a public vote—and a crowd showed up a Mission Playground Sunday to kick off the Yes on B campaign. Sups. Jackie Fielder, who was a founder of the Public Bank Coalition, and Cheyanne Chen, who carried the legislation at the board, were on hand, along with Sup. Bilal Mahmood, who only recently became a supporter.
An hour earlier, a much smaller group held a No on B event, with Sup. Alan Wong speaking. Wong told the Milk Club when he was running for Community College Board that he supported a public bank.
That’s not the first time Wong has shifted his positions. He ran for the college board as a progressive, and since Mayor Daniel Lurie named him to the Board of Supes, he’s become a reliable conservative mayoral ally.
A senior member of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s staff awarded a $5.9 million contract last year to a company that ranked lower on the bidding scores but had connections to the mayor. A report by the supes Budget and Legislative Analyst found that the contract was technically legal, but that the Mayor’s Office did not follow best practices.
Now the Planning Department is asking the supes to approve an amendment to that contract—increasing it by $33 million to almost $40 million. The new contract comes before the Budget and Finance Committee Wednesday/2; it’s agenda item number 22. Agenda item 23 is a hearing on the entire deal, called by Sups. Jackie Fielder and Chyanne Chen.
In other words, the supes are scheduled to approve a $33 million deal before they hear what went wrong with the initial contract.
That meeting starts at 10am.
I’ve never been a fan of the Blue Angels, the loud, dangerous air show that is used as a military recruitment tool and terrifies dogs all over the city. But it brings tens of thousands of spectators to the waterfront—and the last time that happened, it turned into a traffic and public safety nightmare.
One reason: The Waymos got overloaded and stopped working. That happens where there are too many people and not enough bandwidth. (I discovered that problem when my son invited me to a Michigan football game, where the stadium holds 110,000 people. You couldn’t send a text or make a call; 110,000 people taking selfies for their friends far overwhelmed the bandwidth for every provider).
When Waymos don’t know what to do, they stop. And block traffic, and Muni, and make it impossible for police and fire to get through.
So: Sup. Stephen Sherrill has called a hearing Thursday/3 at the Government Audit and Oversight Committee to discuss what we can learn from that fiasco and how to make sure it doesn’t happen during Fleet Week. He’s invited the Mayor’s Office, Muni, the Dept. of Emergency Management, Rec-Park, and the cops and firefighters to come testify.
One key player is missing: Waymo. The city can talk all it wants about safety, but until we either know there’s a plan for the robot cars to avoid stalling—or we ban then altogether that day—the odds are it’s going to be mess again. So where’s are the co-CEOs of Waymo? Sherrill didn’t bother to ask either of them to appear.
That hearing starts at 10am.
It would seem to me that a report showing that 25 percent of the workers in a billion-dollar industry are likely to suffer a severe, debilitating, and often fatal injury for which there is no treatment—simply as a predictable consequence of going to work—would be big news in every city where that industry has employees.
But a study showing that one in four National Football League Players has developer Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, and the numbers may be much higher, didn’t make it into the San Francisco Chronicle until several days after its release, and only in one small article.
The data was clear: At least 25 percent of the players on the San Francisco 49ers football team are likely to face dementia, violent mood swings, depression, and early death because of what they do every day for a paycheck.
All so the owners of the teams, most of whom are already billionaires, can get even richer. The team is now valued at $8 billion.
On the other hand, the Chron assigned at least three reporters and has published at least ten stories about a minor crime involving one of the owners of the team. A police sting captured the owner, who is separated from his wife and undergoing divorce proceedings, looking to pay a woman $140 to have sex with him.
The reporters have scoured police documents. They’ve gone to East Palestine, Ohio and taken pictures of the trailer park where the sting happened. They’ve posted the police video of the guy holding up his hands while the cops arrested him.
Nothing in any of these carefully reported stories suggests that he sought sex with anyone underage, or with someone who had been trafficked against their will.
Is it that big a deal that an adult who is not cheating on his soon-to-be-ex-wife wanted to hire a sex worker? I know, there’s the sordid elements—the trailer park at 9:45 on a Sunday morning, which seems awfully early for that sort of thing. It was, at the very least, a pretty bad lapse in judgment.
But seriously: This is big, huge news, worth sending reporters to a tiny town in Ohio and publishing numerous front-page stories about it—while the paper largely ignores the fact the team is allowing its workers to face perilous conditions that wouldn’t be allowed in any other industry in the country?
I could not possibly care less if a football team owner (or anyone else) hires a sex worker, as long as they’re both consenting adults. I do care if he hires people to make him richer and does nothing to protect them from a short life of brutal infirmity.
Priorities, people.
According to the Business Times, Uber and a company called Zipline are joining forces with Uber Eats to start drone deliveries, and I suspect we will soon see the partnership seek approvals in Bay Area cities. Amazon is already moving toward robot and drone deliveries, and Alphabet, which owns Google, is working with Wal-Mart on a simliar plan.
So pretty soon, the skies about our neighborhoods will be full of buzzing little aircraft that will, presumable, land on our doorsteps or on the sidewalk and drop off food and all the other stuff you can order from Amazon and Wal-Mart.
If this works, it will, of course, put thousands of people who drive for a living out of work. Eventually, the tech industry would like to eliminate all human drivers. More than 2 million people in the US earn their living as drivers—cab drivers, truck drivers, short-haul delivery drivers, bus drivers, even race drivers—and all of them would be pushed into unemployment.
Meanwhile, I don’t really like the idea of having to navigate drones swooping around my neighborhood, sometimes crashing into people, cars, and dogs (who will often by terrified by the robot invasion). I suspect I’m not alone.
The federal government, which controls airspace, could regulate the process, but under Trump, that won’t happen. The state of California could pass regulations, too, but Gov. Gavin Newsom is too busy running for president (and raising money from tech companies) to take any interest.
But San Francisco owns the rights-of-way to the streets, and air rights above them (with the understanding that aviation is controlled by the feds). So the Board of Supes could enact rules limiting the number of drone deliveries, the time of day they can operate, and the type of packages they can deliver. In fact, the city could probably ban drone deliveries over city streets and robot deliveries on streets and sidewalks.
If you’re wondering why Big Tech spend so much money to oust progressives and elect tech-friendly conservatives to the board, you’re about to find out.
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Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.
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