May 25th and 26th
Located on Harrison Street between 16th and 24th Streets

Photo via Carnaval San Francisco / Pankaj Bhargava.

Carnaval San Francisco is a colorful two-day festival held annually over Memorial Day weekend in San Francisco's Mission District. It celebrates Latin American, Caribbean and Afro-diasporic cultures through music, dance, art and cuisine.

Founded in 1979 by a group of artists and activists, it is now the largest multicultural festival on the West Coast. The free festival spans 17 blocks in the Mission District, primarily along Harrison Street between 16th and 24th Streets. It features five main stages with over 50 local artists, 400 vendors, international cuisine, crafts and various activities for all ages.

The highlight is the lively grand parade on Sunday with elaborate costumes, music and dance groups representing different cultures and traditions.

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The misery experienced on San Francisco’s sidewalks has long offered a case study in the failure of California’s mental health care system. Now, the dire situation is inspiring a proposal for a sweeping overhaul.

gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan, to be unveiled Thursday, seeks to tackle two big flaws in the system: the shortage of desperately needed care and the strict limitations on compelling treatment for people who are too sick to understand they need help.

His proposal, called Care Court, would create a mental-health-focused arm of the civil courts in every county. For the first time, the state would require counties to provide comprehensive treatment to those suffering from debilitating psychosis — and risk sanctions if they don’t. The people in the program, in turn, would be obligated to accept the care.

In an exclusive interview Wednesday, Newsom grew visibly angry as he discussed his hometown — the city he presided over as mayor more than a decade ago — which prides itself on its so-called compassion as it lets people wither and die on its streets.

Previous efforts to compel treatment have often run into opposition from mental-health advocates who worry about a return to institutionalization, and say governments should focus on expanding voluntary care. But the governor said there’s no more time to debate people’s civil rights as they endure degradation, and no more time to argue about how to fund the much-needed help.

“There’s no compassion with people with their clothes off defecating and urinating in the middle of the streets, screaming and talking to themselves,” Newsom said. “There’s nothing appropriate about a kid and a mom going down the street trying to get to the park being accosted by people who clearly need help.

“I’m increasingly outraged by what’s going on in the streets,” he said. “I’m disgusted with it.”

Newsom, who has battled homelessness and mental illness in his official capacities for two decades — and has faced pressure to do more — sounded optimistic that this proposal could yield dramatic change.

Under his vision, people suffering from psychosis — whether from a mental illness such as schizophrenia or triggered by severe drug addiction — could be brought before a Superior Court judge under three scenarios: either they are suspected of a crime, an involuntary hold in a psychiatric emergency room is ending, or a family member or outreach worker believes they cannot care for themselves. A public defender would represent them.

A county clinical team would create a care plan with input from the person and their “supporter,” a county case manager who would help them navigate the process and make decisions.

The plan would likely include clinical services such as visits with a psychiatrist, prescriptions for medications and housing such as at a board-and-care facility. The person wouldn’t need to be homeless to qualify. If a judge ordered the plan, the county would be mandated to provide what’s needed and the person would be required to accept it.

If the person suffering from psychosis refused at any point to participate, their criminal case would proceed. If no crime was committed, they could face the existing state process, in which people who are gravely disabled or deemed to be a danger to themselves or others are placed under involuntary holds and eventual conservatorship. Medication could be court-ordered, but would not be forcibly given.

Failure to take mandated medications could mean the person reverts to the criminal court or eventual conservatorship. The idea is to help people long before either of those outcomes is necessary.

Care Court would need legislative approval, which Newsom hopes to secure by June for implementation in January. The legislative process will include debate over how much additional money to provide to the courts.

A loud contingent has fought increases in involuntary treatment and conservatorship for years—and may fight the governor’s plan, too. They include advocates for homeless and disabled people who say forcing people to accept treatment is cruel, as well as some politicians and mental health clinicians who say increasing the number of conservatorships without far more treatment beds and staff isn’t viable.

Newsom brushed off those concerns Wednesday, saying the status quo is intolerable.

It’s unclear whether his sweeping, expensive idea will pan out, but what’s certain is that the current system is failing miserably.

Every week in San Francisco seems to bring new, horrifying stories of people suffering because they are experiencing crippling mental illness or drug addiction. Last week, a homeless woman and mother of three whose ex-husband said she suffered from severe drug addiction, and whose friend said she had behaved erratically, died in a fire while taking shelter from the cold under a freeway overpass in Glen Park.

On Sunday, Leonard Krubner was riding a Muni train when another passenger shoved him, screamed about him being in the FBI, called him anti-gay slurs and brandished a switchblade. Krubner darted off the train and reported the incident to a Muni agent — who said a similar report had been made the night before.

“Hello! Someone, do something!” Krubner said in an interview. “I try to be sympathetic to people with problems. Nevertheless, we just can’t have them coming onto public transit and brandishing knives.”

On Saturday, a group of seven women and girls were celebrating a birthday at Ocean Beach when a man who said they seemed profoundly ill or high approached them, grabbed their food and threw it into the sand. He then grabbed a can of soda and hurled it into the face of Karla Flemmings, one of the celebrants, who passed out.

“I laid there and I literally asked, ‘God, am I dying today?'” Flemmings, 50, said. “Then I thought I’d lost my eye. I didn’t think it was even still there.”

A man sitting nearby called 911. Police responded and booked a 46-year-old man on suspicion of felony assault with a deadly weapon and misdemeanor vandalism. He remains in jail.

Flemmings was diagnosed with a concussion and multiple fractures in her nose. Her face was severely swollen and her eye was shut for days. She spoke compassionately about the assailant, who said she appeared to be homeless and clearly needed help.

“I’m born and raised in San Francisco, and I’ve seen the drastic changes that have occurred firsthand,” she said. “So many people don’t have money when there’s so much wealth and opulence in the Bay Area. Something better has to be done — real services and real support.”

Last year, the state approved spending $12 billion to address homelessness and mental health. Newsom’s proposed budget for this year includes another $2 billion. Of the $14 billion total, $4.5 billion is tagged specifically for mental health treatment.

The state’s Mental Health Services Act, a 1% income tax on the wealthy that passed in 2004, will provide another $3.8 billion this year to counties for treatment, a pot that’s grown significantly from last year as incomes of the wealthiest Californians have soared.

Whether the money will be enough to provide the huge amount of care Newsom envisions is a big question, but the governor’s team says the program would save money elsewhere in pricey jails and hospitals.

Darrell Steinberg, the Sacramento mayor who authored the Mental Health Services Act when he was in the state Legislature, said he supports the Care Court concept because it would finally compel counties to provide services on the state’s dime.

“Everything that cities and counties are called upon to do in providing help and treatment is voluntary and optional,” Steinberg said. “We don’t say to our local communities, ‘You know, provide a free public education to kids or don’t, whatever you choose.’ We require it.”

Clearly, the up-to-you approach for counties when it comes to mental health isn’t adequate. Under Laura’s Law, the program designed to compel outpatient treatment for seriously mentally ill people, just 218 people in the entire state were subject to enter court-ordered treatment in 2018-19, according to the governor’s office.

The foundation for mental health treatment remains the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1967 in a bid to empower people experiencing mental illness. It allows for short, involuntary psychiatric holds if a person is deemed potentially dangerous, and allows a judge to appoint a longer-term conservator to make decisions for people who are “gravely disabled.”

But in 2019-20, though there were more than 55,000 short-term holds around the state, just 5,584 long-term conservatorships were put in place. Some of those could have been renewals in cases that are years or even decades old.

Last year, judges found 4,531 people incompetent to stand trial on felony charges, meaning they couldn’t understand the nature of their case or assist in their defense. Two-thirds of them were homeless, and nearly half had received no mental health treatment in the previous six months.

In June 2019, San Francisco opted into a controversial state law to expand eligibility for conservatorship to include those suffering from severe drug addictions and mental illness. But nearly three years later, just two people have been preserved.

Newsom called all of these initiatives “small ball” compared to Care Court, asserting that many of them involved years of fights for few results.

“This is a moral exercise,” he said. “The risk here is not taking one.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight usually appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf

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“Since the pandemic, workers have known they need a seat at the table,” says Allynn Umel, the national coordinator of the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) Fight for $15. Since 2012, the union has supported the “Fight for $15” — named after the proposed new minimum wage — to organize fast-food workers. During the pandemic alone, Umel says, workers have filed hundreds of complaints with regulators about unsafe working conditions, unfair treatment, or both. In a recent opinion poll
of Los Angeles County fast-food workers conducted by the UCLA Labor Center, a quarter of those surveyed said they had complained to a manager. Of those who complained, a quarter faced some form of retaliation, including pay cuts, threats and harassment.

The litany of complaints and the lukewarm response from regulators have prompted the SEIU to rally behind new legislation that could give fast-food workers a lasting voice in government — one that could also empower them in the workplace.

If passed, California’s AB 257, commonly known as the “FAST Recovery Act,” will create an 11-member “Sector Council” to set standards for wages, training and working conditions for fast-food restaurants, part of a chain of 30 or more locations nationwide. While four of the council’s 11 members would come from the state’s health and labor boards, two seats would be reserved for the fast-food workers themselves, and two more for workers’ “supporters” such as lawyers or union representatives. The last two seats would be reserved for the industry itself: one representing fast-food corporations (such as McDonald’s Corporation and Yum! Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut) and one for the franchisees who own their restaurants . But far from creating a distanced observer of industry wrongdoing, the bill would also require state regulators to crack down on any individual company the council deems violating its standards. It’s a model that has precedent in Europe, where “sectoral collective bargaining” is a common means of enforcing labor rights for workers across an industry, regardless of their employer.

California is a natural place to test a novel approach to regulating fast food. In the postwar years, an affinity for public investment enabled the lightning-fast conversion of much of the state’s deserts and farmland to suburbs, paving the way for the first restaurant chains to focus exclusively on car-bound customers, including McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr, Taco Bell, In -N-Out and Jack in the Box – all of which opened their first locations in the state’s redesigned landscapes. Decades later, a propensity for government participation is now registering in the form of veto-proof Democratic supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, making it possible to enact the kind of ambitious legislation that progressives in the US Congress can only dream of. AB 257 was considered last year, fail
by just three votes, but if an amended version is likely to come to a vote this week, it’s likely to sail through the state legislature. (Under lawmakers’ rules, the House of Commons must vote on the bill by the end of the month for it to pass this year.) A strong network of activists across California has also made the state a frontline for the fast-food labor movement. In 2016, Fight For $15 activists secured the first $15 national minimum wage.

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“People have to understand that empowerment is beauty,” he says. “Empowerment is love, creativity and openness. That’s a beautiful gesture, that’s a beautiful deed … I don’t want to be bold enough to say “revolutionary”, but in some ways it is that we will believe in it about bricks and mortar, about finances, about a well-known story. “

For Allison Page, the Executive Artistic Director of Killing My Lobster, San Francisco’s 24-year-old sketch comedy company, the pandemic brought an unexpected insight. Accustomed to acting in almost constant motion (in addition to her myriad tasks at Killing My Lobster (KML), Page is also a playwright and occasionally an actress) and stuck in what she calls the “limbo” of the slow, uncertain advance in the direction of. denotes the reopening of live performances exhausting them in new ways.

The pandemic shutdown gave her time to investigate other aspects of her life as well, which led her and her musician husband Al Kong to decide to move to Nashville, Tennessee in 2022. While Pages’ announcement of her imminent resignation from the company, which she described as artistic, is more than a decade away from her departure home, the search for her successor has already begun. The company plans to hire an Executive Director in July and then an Artistic Director by January 2022 so that each new leader has time to intersect with Page, whose institutional knowledge of the company and its many activities is in-depth.

Allison Page in her award-winning role in “How Does That Make You Feel” with Killing My Lobster. (Clinton Nelson)

Page is no stranger to running a company with limited resources and people. At the age of 18, after the drama teacher retired, she applied to direct the fall production of the high school in her hometown of Thief River Falls, Minnesota. This early success gave her the impetus to start her own community theater company – Big Al’s Traveling Theater – which she ran for five years before moving to San Francisco in 2008. In order to raise money for her productions, Page took part in medical studies.

“I would take these non-branded versions of drugs to test their side effects against the branded version and basically get locked up in a hospital for a month,” she recalls. “But I got … five grand so I could produce a show.” Upon arriving in San Francisco, she starred in longtime Tony and Tina’s Wedding, performed stand-up comedy, and participated in plays such as Pint Sized Plays, Diva Fest, and the SF Olympians Festival. In 2010 she was part of the KML Preaches to the Choir ensemble and has been active in the company ever since.

Allison Page, second from left, in KML Presents 1997 with Killing My Lobster. (James Jordan Pictures)

An initiative Page is particularly proud of the fact that at the beginning of her tenure as an employee she implemented diversity in Comedy Fellowships that are currently offered to BIPOC and LGBTQIA + applicants in both comedy writing and comedy acting. These grants were designed to ensure these communities were represented in the writers’ room and acting pool – as the grantees are guaranteed a place on a show after they “graduate” from the program, according to Page. Some later became professors at KML, started their own businesses and ensembles, and even moved out of the Bay Area to look for opportunities in LA and elsewhere.

“If you can create a system where more people have experiences they didn’t have before, and then use those experiences to not only propel yourself forward – but also take other people with you – then it will be better for everyone. “

Allison Page in the director’s chair at Killing My Lobster. (James Jordan Pictures)

As for her own ride, Page isn’t sure what her future holds or if she’ll stay in the theater. For KML, however, she hopes it will continue to be a place that “prioritizes the needs and passions of the artists who work there”. The company recently released a Bill of Rights for Artists (inspired by the HUGE Improv Theater in Minneapolis), a Bill of Rights for Students, a Needs to Create Access Questionnaire, and an update on their DEI and Anti-Racism Action Plans. All of this, according to Page Points, is in the works, but she hopes that work will normalize across the industry.

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