San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has a great view looking out the window of his conference room on the eighth-story of his Los Angeles campaign office. The 41-year-old Mayor of California’s fourth largest city has been vocal with his views on the entire State since he announced his candidacy for Governor in next year’s election. Newsom makes regular trips from the Bay Area to Southern California, including several trips to Long Beach – most recently to serve as Grand Marshal of the 2009 Long Beach Pride Parade last month.
Gavin Christopher Newsom, a democrat, was elected to the City and County of San Francisco’s top job in 2003 and reelected in 2007 with 73% of the vote. In 1993, he founded PlumpJack Wine Shop, which comprises fourteen enterprises ranging from “restaurants, wineries, hotels, spas, shops, and whatever business we find next between the earth and the stars.”
Ever the tech-head of politics (he announced his candidacy on Twitter and formalized it on Facebook), Newsom, his iPhone and I sat down to discuss his impressions of Long Beach, its future role in the state economy, and similarities between San Francisco and Long Beach – from our ports and education to budget challenges and the future of local media – in part one of our exclusive interview.
lbpost.com: What’s your objective for your current trip to Southern California?
Newsom: Just meeting with people. I actually had a good policy discussion this morning around education with a large foundation and lots of individual meetings throughout the day. So, it’s really about introducing myself to people. As you know, we’ve been doing town halls all over the state. We were down in your neck of the woods recently for the Pride Parade. We’ve also been doing town halls all throughout the southern part of the state. We’ll continue to do town halls.
My focus in the last month, candidly, has been my own budget, which I just submitted – a balanced budget that doesn’t raise taxes, doesn’t borrow, no teacher layoffs, and no police officer or firefighter layoffs. We expanded our universal healthcare plan – the only one in the nation – and expanded housing for the homeless. I’m pretty proud of that. In spite of the fact there were a lot of cuts in that budget, there was a huge deficit – larger in percentage terms than in the state of California’s deficit.
But that’s been a great challenge for us, dealing with that reality which is very much in line with what people are asking me down here and everywhere else, “What would you do about the state deficit? What kind of government would there be?”
I keep answering: it took me six months to put a budget together for my own city, and if you want to know my values, if you want to know what I’d do with the state, take a look at my budget. Under the circumstances, making the tough choices are the types of choices that I make, these are the things that I value, these are the things that I enhanced in the budget, and here’s the way we balanced it – again, without new taxes and without any borrowing.
LBP: Like you mentioned, you were down in Long Beach for Pride a couple of weeks ago and I know you came down for Lambda [editor’s note: Newsom was the keynote speaker and an honoree at Lambda’s banquet] a few months ago, as well.
GN: Yeah, it was great.
LBP: And I’m sure you’ve made plenty of other trips that I’m not aware of.
GN: Yeah, in and out to say hi to folks and some fundraisers periodically down in Long Beach. It’s been great.
LBP: What’s your impression of Long Beach?
GN: I know your mayor [Bob Foster] very well from the U.S. Conference of Mayors where we are on a bunch of committees. So, a lot of the issues are our issues. We’re port cities, so there’s a familiarity in terms of the issues. Of course, Long Beach is one of the most dynamic economic engines, not only in the state but the country, with one of the most important ports in the world. So those issues are obviously magnified when I’m down in Long Beach, versus at home with a port which is less of an industrial port than is, for example, the Port of Oakland. Talking to [Long Beach Mayor] Bob [Foster] and everyone in Long Beach, the issues are so remarkably similar to ours in San Francisco. Obviously, it’s jobs and the economy, it’s healthcare and education, it’s the environment. Everywhere I go, it’s the same issues – people looking for a new direction and a new approach.
LBP: When you were talking about some of the budget challenges that you’ve faced in San Francisco, it sounded a lot like some of the things that are happening in Long Beach. For example, the state budget deficit is starting to impact young people here in Long Beach. Summer school, after-school programs and daycare funding have been cut. What would you say to the people that are being hurt by that now?
GN: Again, I am so intimately familiar with those issues and I appreciate the challenges. I think the most important thing right now is to make sure the state doesn’t raid the county budgets and city budgets. That’s, to me, the number one priority for your mayor, for the mayor in Los Angeles, and something all of the mayors across this state ought to fight against – the $2 billion raid of our county dollars.
I was in Sacramento two days ago and I know that a lot of other mayors have been up there too making a strong case about the consequences and putting a human face on the consequences of these additional cuts. Again, these cuts are on top of the already burdensome budgets that we are faced with.
But I let me tell you a little bit about our city. I used our rainy day reserve to guarantee that no teachers were laid off. We’re expanding our universal preschool program –it’s the only one in the state of California in this year’s budget. We’ve put the most money ever into our Afterschool For All program. And, we’re keeping our summer schools open. In fact, we enhanced our summer lunch program, too. We’ve put more resources in than we did even in the previous year because those are the things that I value. However, there are tradeoffs. I had to start an historic number of layoffs. I had wage concessions with labor, consolidated departments, eliminated agencies, etc.
So in the context of this Governor’s race, I want people to look at what we value in the context of what we prioritize – against cuts and what we invest in. For example, we did not cut universal health coverage for children and we invested in an unprecedented commitment to the healthcare of our general population, too.
LBP: Going back to the ports a little bit, what kind of importance will the trade industry have driving the state’s economy?
GN: It’s critical. One of the great gifts in California and one of the reasons I’m very optimistic about our future is our gateway status to Asia, and the Pacific. We are uniquely positioned in terms of the macro-economic growth that the world will experience when the economy begins to turn the tide – in this case literally, not just figuratively. So, Long Beach is a profoundly significant part of the economic success of this state.
There are environmental issues that are real and there are infrastructure issues that are real in terms of the aging facilities at our Ports. There are obviously issues that need to be addressed in relationship to trade, too. Be it Japan – who is one of our biggest trading partners – or Canada, Mexico, and certainly in relationship to the opportunities in China and Asia abroad. Long Beach is not just a port from an infrastructure perspective, but it’s the infrastructure that connects the port to the rest of the state and the nation, that also needs to be improved and upgraded. That, I think, will define our resurgence and define economic growth of the state for years to come.
LBP: I’ve also read a little bit about some of the problems that your newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, has been having.
GN: Oh boy.
LBP: Their situation is kind of similar to what’s going on in Long Beach. Our daily newspaper, the Press-Telegram is going through some tough times, as the entire industry is as well. I know you’ve had some pretty unique thoughts on media in general.
GN: I do. Actually, we’re working with a group of folks to potentially help support the Chronicle convert to a nonprofit sort of KQED-type model [editor’s note: KQED is San Francisco’s public radio station], an NPR-type [National Public Radio] model, where we would have a non-profit that would be supported not exclusively by one entity or organization but by members in a not dissimilar way that public television, public radio is because of the public good and the public necessity – from our perspective – of having a newspaper in our city.
Obviously the demographics have shifted dramatically and are beginning to move in a direction towards digitization and towards an online presence, in terms of focusing away from newsprint and paper delivery. That obviously needs to be represented in the next phase of the evolution of the newspaper industry and business. But a newspaper is a central lifeblood of our city, state and nation, and I would hate to see the direction, for example, of France and other nations where you’re starting to see the municipalization of newspapers. I think that is a very dangerous game when government starts taking control of the industry. So, we’re just trying to be a conduit to the extent that the Hearst Corporation is saying that they’ll shut down the newspaper unless there’s a buyer and we think there may be a third way. We have some big former editors and a former publisher at the Chronicle helping, trying to organize either a buyer, trying to organize a new strategy and a new way of looking at newspapers.
LBP: You were recently quoted as saying that if the newspaper industry ceased, people under thirty wouldn’t really notice.
GN: Yeah, it was interesting. The Economist Magazine wrote that and it was an amazing statement because I absolutely said it…with context. I said is that people like me – and I’m not 30 or younger – read the Chronicle every single day on an iPhone. I also said, I’m not a subscriber and I don’t get a [print] newspaper in the morning. I do it right here. So people wouldn’t even notice their newspaper going away because they’re still getting the digitized format. Obviously it’s hyperbole, it’s exaggerated, but more and more people are getting their news online. We have a great site, SFGate.com, which does a great job. The Chronicle is actually a leader in getting on-line early, to their credit, and, to their burden too. I mean it’s the reason I’m not subscribing, because they do a great job online. So I said a lot of folks under 30 probably wouldn’t notice.
But again, the critical point I was making was that the newspaper is the lifeblood of our city. I mean, forget covering politics, that’s just one small component of what a newspaper does. I was even telling the reporters from The Economist that I opened a wine store and a series of businesses that created about 1,000 jobs in California before I got into politics. My little business right out of college would not have succeeded had it not been for our newspaper and the fact that they did a little business section about what’s new in our neighborhoods. They gave reviews to our restaurant, and people started coming… it turned the corner for us. To lose that connection to the community would be devastating.
Tomorrow: Part Two of our exclusive interview with San Francisco Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom.
Photos by Russell Conroy.
Click here for part two of our exclusive interview with San Francisco Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom.
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