By NICHOLAS KUSNETZ
The biggest news in the World of Campos this past week may not seem that big, but it’s news. Well, actually, it’s a newsletter. It took a while, but you can finally get some info about what your representative is doing by signing up for his monthly Campos Connect. Next stop … press releases?
In truth, it was a pretty slow week at city hall. The Board of Supervisors pushed up its meeting to catch the Giants’ home opener, and everybody showed up a bit late to Campos’ Public Safety Committee on Monday. The late start didn’t stop them from getting to business and looking into unresolved homicides, though.
The Budget and Finance Committee meeting seemed to go according to plan on Wednesday. Campos chimed in with Supervisors Bevan Dufty and Ross Mirkarimi in grilling city officials about an alleged pilfering of Muni dollars. Apparently, some city departments, including the cops, may be charging Muni for services that were never provided. Normally, departments charge Muni when police and others do some transit-related work, such as traffic enforcement or responding to a 311 call regarding public transportation, but a Muni official told the committee he isn’t sure it’s all kosher.
When the police came to the stand, Campos wanted to know the deal. Might some of this money be going toward the shady traffic stops he’s talked about before—the stops that some residents have called racial profiling? And if the police are billing Muni for all these services, he asked Commander Sandra Tong, couldn’t the department at least put some more officers on the 14?
We’ve long known there aren’t enough police on Muni, Campos said, “and when you compound that issue with the fact that a lot of money is being provided to the police department by Muni, I think that creates some real concerns.”
Later in the meeting, the committee heard about the impacts of budget cuts to building and housing inspectors’ work, which includes outreach to tenants. The housing inspector serving District 9 came up and told the committee his position is being cut at the end of April. Campos asked some detailed questions about how many people he meets on a given day and what type of people they are. He was getting at something. The inspector is an immigrant, and Campos clearly wanted to show the committee the importance of being able to reach out to immigrants, especially those that don’t speak English. The inspector complied. Sometimes immigrants are reluctant to report a problem with a landlord, the inspector said. All a way of showing, it seemed, yet another way Mission residents could be hurt by looming budget cuts.