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A San Francisco supervisor has introduced legislation that would seek to place an 18-month moratorium on all new parcel delivery services in the city, including Amazon’s proposed 725,000-square foot, last-mile logistics center in Showplace Square.

Shamann Walton, who represents the neighborhood where the logistics center will be located, introduced the legislation Feb. 15.

Walton said big companies need to have conversations with local residents about large projects planned for their communities.

“As a community, we must be allowed to decide if we want these types of facilities and businesses, and not just to be told that they are moving into our neighborhood,” he said at Feb. 15’s board of supervisors meeting.

The move, backed by the Teamsters and the United Commercial Food Workers, is the latest battle in the war between organized labor and Amazon, which has planned or already opened more than two dozen distribution centers throughout the Bay Area.

Jim Araby, strategic campaign director with the United Food & Commercial Workers, said Amazon has been aggressively buying and leasing “last-mile” warehouses throughout the Bay Area, spending more than $1 billion acquiring properties that are zoned for industrial uses or distribution.

“They need to build as quickly as possible with as few roadblocks as possible,” he said.

He said the 18-month break would allow the city to come up with regulations that would help ensure that parcel delivery services don’t adversely impact local residents with traffic, pollution and noise, and that the workers hired would be treated fairly.

“The city needs the tools necessary to evaluate the impact of this project,” Araby said.

Doug Bloch, political director at Teamsters Joint Council 7, said the legislation represents an escalation in the “trench warfare” the unions have been engaged in against Amazon over the past few years as the company has sought to build warehouses in and close to urban areas Contra Costa County, Morgan Hill, Santa Rosa, Hayward, Gilroy and San Jose.

“The battle has come to San Francisco — this is the big one,” he said. “This is San Francisco saying we need to pause and evaluate this project and what it means for our communities and our workers.”

Bloch said a fight in San Francisco “could have national implications” as Amazon pushes to locate its logistic facilities in the urban core of big cities.

The site where Amazon is hoping to build a warehouse has, for decades, been home to Recology, a trash hauling company. Recology sold it to Amazon for $200 million after unsuccessfully trying to rezone the land for about 1,000 housing units. The property, which abuts California College of the Arts and is at the edge of the city’s design district known as Showplace Square, is zoned for “Production Distribution and Repair,” which means that Amazon does not need any zoning variances in order to built there .

The previous effort to build housing there was strongly opposed by nearby residents in the Dogpatch and Potrero Hill neighborhoods.

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San Francisco is finally making strides in using open source technology in voting machines, a long-stalled city project that proponents say could save tax dollars, increase security, and provide voters with more transparency in elections.

On Tuesday evening, President Shamann Walton announced to the board of directors that he was driving a pilot program to use open source voting machines in the city’s elections in November 2022. According to Walton, the law requires the Department of Elections to submit a plan for the pilot project to the Secretary of State by February next year.

“Open source voting technology would enable The City’s tech teams to work with voting software software vendors because it uses publicly available computer code,” said Walton, citing a recent Examiner study of San Francisco voting machine systems .

Correspondence The Examiner received through a public record request showed that the San Francisco Electoral Authority had made no progress in developing open source voting technology in more than a decade while relying heavily on a voting machine company that such technology poses a threat to its business interests.

“It has been a long effort to implement open source voting in San Francisco,” Walton told the Examiner in an email. “San Francisco should be an innovator when it comes to election transparency.”

Examiner’s investigation found that San Francisco election director John Arntz, in close consultation with Dominion Voting Systems, once submitted a city report on open source voting technology to the company before reading the report himself.

Dominion was the only company to bid on Arntz’s last deal, which doubled its interest rates to $ 12 million over the next six years.

The city’s desire to introduce open source voting technology dates back to 2006, according to a civil jury report examining the long delays. The report found that the system could offer long-term “cost savings, increased electoral security and public ownership of the critical infrastructure of democracy”.

Other city, state and federal leaders agree. “Open source is the ultimate in transparency and accountability for all,” said former California Secretary of State and current US Senator Alex Padilla.

But the state hasn’t yet certified an open source voting system, and the city has held back from exploring the technology, despite funding and pressures from mayors and overseers. The Secretary of State approved the San Francisco pilot program last Friday following a request from Walton in September. The elections in San Francisco in 2022 could mark the breakthrough that the city and state have been seeking for more than a decade and enable a transition to open source voting systems.

The pilot is being conducted as a joint effort between The City’s Elections Department and VotingWorks, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that previously worked with the Department of Homeland Security and Microsoft on voting technology.

Already in September Arntz had dismissed the non-profit organization at a meeting of the electoral commission during a discussion about open source voting technology with the words: “We are not planning a pilot program.”

Arntz told The Examiner earlier this month that he was not “against open source,” but his department, which has three elections in five months, “doesn’t have much time” to research new technologies.

Walton said Tuesday evening that Arntz was “already working with VotingWorks on details and a contract for the pilot project. This law will codify that process. ”The law requires Arntz’s department to submit a plan to the Secretary of State by February 8, 2022, Walton said. Arntz did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the pilot program.

Despite a lack of progress in open source voting, Arntz has led fair and safe elections in San Francisco for nearly two decades, say many electoral experts. “The electoral department does a marvelous job,” stated the grand jury’s civil report in general. “The focus of the department is clearly on the needs of the voters.”

Walton credited Election Commissioner Chris Jerdonek, a longtime advocate of open source electoral technology, for campaigning “to ensure that our elections are fair, honest and secure with open source coding”.

Jerdonek described the progress on the pilot project as “a breakthrough” in an interview with The Examiner. “It brings us one step closer to open source alternatives to proprietary vendors.” Jerdonek said progress has benefited from “The Examiner being able to shed light on open source voting talks.”

jelder@sfexaminer.com

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Worrying gray whale deaths along the Pacific coast two years ago appear to have continued into 2020, raising concerns that the ocean giants’ celebrated boom may not be safe.

Once near extinction, the whales are dying from a combination of killer whale attacks, ship attacks and starvation. Scientists aren’t sure why these hazards led to a sharp increase in deaths, but they believe this is related to disruptions in marine conditions caused by climate change.

As the whales swim past California this winter, marine biologists are watching an unprecedented migration between the Arctic and Mexico to see if the worrying trend will continue for another year. Some fear that ocean changes will pose an ever greater challenge to the cherished Titan, and could affect its future in the long term.

“We may have a few years where the death rate is lower,” said Pádraig Duignan, chief pathologist at the Marine Mammal Center in the Marin Headlands who performed necropsy of the whales. “But I expect such events to happen more often than in the past.”

In 2020, 172 whales were found washed up on beaches along the west coast of North America, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 79 were in the United States, 88 in Mexico, and five in Canada. The numbers were only slightly lower than the 214 in 2019.

While some stranded whales are common during the annual whale migration, the recent numbers are not normal. For every whale found dead, the scientists estimate that five to ten more whales die unnoticed. Most sink to the bottom of the ocean or decompose without landing.

In 2019, when the surge in deaths was first observed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “Unusual Mortality Event,” a label that money and researchers pointed to the problem. A team of federal and academic investigators continues to try to learn more about why the whales are dying.

Gray whales were once common in the northern hemisphere. Today they are found in only two different population groups: a small group on the coasts of China, Korea and Russia and the recreational group that travels up and down the west coast every year.

Both populations were critically endangered a century ago, but international protection and the ban on commercial whaling are credited with saving the species. It is believed that the North American group has now grown to nearly 27,000 animals. The 50-foot beasts, which weigh 90,000 pounds and can live for 80 years, have become a popular spectacle for coastal visitors to the Bay Area.

The concern, however, is that increasing disruption to the marine environment could undo decades of progress.

“When the population changes, it can happen dramatically and quickly,” said Duignan. “The whales are fine now, but if something more drastic happens the population could crash.”

Observations and autopsies by Duignan and other scientists reveal a handful of causes of death for the whales. However, poor nutrition often underlies the animal’s condition, and when it did not result in death, it sometimes contributed to it.

For example, if a gray whale succumbs to a killer whale, it could be that the whale is not healthy enough to defend itself or its calf, Duignan said. A collision with a ship could be the result of a whale moving to new places to find food, such as San Francisco Bay, where it is more likely to be exposed to human activity.

This breach was discovered in 2017 by a gray whale just off the coast of Moss Beach on the coast of San Mateo County during a whale watching trip from Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay.

Chris Biertuempfel / Oceanic Society 2017

Most of the scientists’ observations and autopsies were conducted in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic limited research and collaboration over the past year. However, those involved in the work say their thinking stays the same: the whale’s poor health is likely linked to stress caused by the ocean caused by climate change.

The biggest problems are in the Arctic, where the whales spend their summers feeding.

There they rely on shrimp-like crustaceans known as amphipods, which they eat from the sea floor. However, these amphipods can become less numerous and less nutritious. The algae that the amphipods eat and that grow on sea ice before falling to the seabed become scarcer as the ice retreats in warmer temperatures. As a result, the amphipods are not as robust and the whales are not getting the meals they are used to.

Higher ocean temperatures in the Pacific have also changed the distribution of the whale’s other prey, which includes plankton, ghost shrimp and crab larvae, and fish that share their prey. Both affect a gray whale’s diet.

“Warmer water is generally not good for productivity,” said Sue Moore, a University of Washington scientist who studies whales in the Alaskan Arctic and is part of the team that studies deaths. “The (new) prey may have less fat and may be less nutritious. The whale’s body condition will show signs of it and if they are female they may not be able to give birth to a calf. “

The whales’ weakened condition also makes them more prone to disease, Moore said.

“Is that enough to trigger the (mortality) event? I don’t know, ”she said.

Fortunately, the whales are very resilient, added Moore. They are able to switch to new food sources and change their migrations to look for food. This helps them withstand the changing ocean and hold out on their 10,000 mile round trip that takes them back to the Baja California lagoons, where they give birth and spend part of the winter.

The deaths eerily resemble a spike in whale deaths two decades ago. In 1999 and 2000, more than 600 whales were reported stranded on the west coast. Scientists estimate that 20% of the total gray whale population has been lost. However, in 2001 the numbers stabilized and so far there has been no significant decrease.

John Calambokidis, senior research biologist at the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington and part of the team studying whale deaths, says the current episode may just be another correction in the population.

“There are still many puzzles as to why we saw such a dramatic increase in mortality,” he said. “If we see mortality continuing into 2021, I will become increasingly concerned – and possibly alarmed.”

Kurtis Alexander is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander

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