Bayview Referendum Organizers Submit Signatures with Style

by Casey Mills, Beyond Chron (reposted)

Thu, Aug 31, 2006 7:46AM

Organizers of the effort to place a referendum on Bayview Redevelopment before San Francisco voters submited more than 30,000 signatures to the Elections Department yesterday. The signatures arrived in grand style, when a polished black hearse accompanied by a three-piece jazz band playing New Orleans-style dirges pulled up in front of City Hall. A velvet-lined coffin emerged from the back of the hearse, filled with the voter-signed petitions and emblazoned with the phrase 'Bayview Redevelopment * R.I.P.' While organizers submitted thousands more signatures than the 20,800 necessary for the referendum to qualify, elections officials must now begin the process of verifying that those that signed were registered voters. Should the measure qualify, referendum organizers could claim an astonishing victory, breathing life to a fight many considered long over.

The battle to bring the Bayview Redevelopment Plan to the ballot began three months ago, when the Board of Supervisors voted 6-3 to give more than 1,300 acres of property in the city's southeast sector to the Redevelopment Agency. A campaign to defeat the measure at both the Planning Commission and the Board, headed up by a coalition of Bayview activists who argued the plan would bring gentrification and a lack of democracy to the area, failed.

These activists then joined with groups outside the neighborhood who also opposed Redevelopment, most notably the man behind the hearse and coffin ploy, Brian O'Flynn. They began an effort to place a referendum of the plan on the ballot, in the hopes of getting the referendum before voters in November of 2007.

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