Imagine one morning you wake up and you’re a San Francisco Supervisor. At City Hall, you are the face and voice for the thousands of residents in your district. Most speak English, some only Chinese and Russian. Your district has a healthy mix of residence types, ranging from moderate homes to impressive, cliff-dwelling mansions overlooking the bay.
There’s not just residents to contend with, you’re also on the hook for representing hundreds of small businesses. Your district is home to “new Chinatown”, Russian bakeries, two movie theaters, countless small grocers, and more restaurants than you could ever eat at. In addition to homes and businesses, your district is blessed with the largest park in the city. But the department that runs it never has enough money.
After considering all that in your first few moments of the day, you may be ready to roll over and go back to sleep. On the day I interviewed our District 1 Supervisor, Eric Mar, was feeling a little like that.
“Today has been one of those days where it was really hard to get out of bed”. Worn thin the night before from a Board of Supervisors meeting, Mar met Police Captain Richard Correia for breakfast at Eats on Clement. “His immediate reaction was ‘You look tired out'” Mar tells me with a laugh.
Burning the candle at both ends seems to be the norm for Mar. “It’s not unusual for me to have days with twelve to thirteen hours of straight meetings,” he tells me after detailing just the early hours of his day before sitting for my interview.
After meeting with the Police Captain, it was off to City Hall for a meeting about the eastern span of the Bay Bridge. Then it was a tour of a housing development on Market Street before grabbing a hotdog for lunch and a quick pass through the Civic Center Farmer’s Market.
Even in his brief moments of downtime, Mar usually has to contend with various opinions. On his way back from lunch, he’s approached by a library user who has a few things to say about an upcoming project.
Mar concedes that a lot of his role so far as a Supervisor has been to listen. While a professor of Asian American and Ethnic Studies at SF State for sixteen years, Mar says “[students] had to listen when I was lecturing at eight in the morning, but here, I feel like I have to be the listener”. Listening to interest groups, neighborhood residents, concerned business owners, other supervisors and politicians – the list goes on and on. “Often I have to do my best to listen and cut a conversation short so I don’t miss my next meeting”.
And there’s always more meetings to attend. After our interview, he’s off to meet with the Richmond District representative of the city’s graffiti task force, and then it’s a meeting with a concerned Sea Cliff resident. After a quick dinner, he’s off to present at the Planning Association of the Richmond meeting.
Finding balance has been a key objective for Mar, whether it’s city issues versus those of his district or trying to balance his work and personal life. “When I started it was mostly city-wide issues that I was dealing with. We’re getting closer to a 50/50 split [between city and district issues] which I want to achieve” Mar says and sums it up with “I need to be in the neighborhood more”.
Part of his district outreach efforts have included town hall meetings which he and his staff had originally planned to do monthly on the most urgent issues facing residents. But with the many demands of the office, they’ve settled on quarterly meetings with a goal of “figuring out a way to engage people more so they’re identifying problems and coming up with solutions”.
With our current economic downturn, Supervisor Mar is keeping a close eye on Richmond District businesses and building relationships with owners. Graffiti is a hot button topic in the neighborhood and Mar is learning the intimate details of the much maligned art form.
Many businesses can’t afford the expenses that come with graffiti removal, so Mar is frequently in discussions with police and the Dept. of Public Works about how to lessen the burden on business owners. He can even tell you about the cursed glue that some graffiti vandals use that eats away at the glass fronts on Laundromats. “I’m learning these nitty gritty things about the neighborhood to support these small merchants”.
While some neighborhood businesses have closed their doors during these tough times, Mar is also looking forward and trying to bring new businesses into the district. Like many residents, Mar says he is “really disappointed about the Fresh & Easy delay”, referring to the supermarket that was scheduled to take over the 32nd Avenue and Clement property but recently cited “to be determined” as their new move-in date.
Mar continues “It’s really hard with the economy to get a larger grocery store to come in. My hope is that people see the smaller markets as a place they can still shop even though it might cost more, but not always”.
While district issues take up his time, he has other responsibilities to the city as a Supervisor. Currently he serves on the Land Use and Economic Development Committee and on the Local Area Formation Commission (LAFCO), tasked with identifying and developing alternative energy sources for San Francisco.
As a first-time Supervisor, new colleagues and the City Hall environment can take some getting used to. Board meetings are “like a competition between the eleven supervisors” and he concedes that he has to “get used to that culture of really speaking out on an equal level with other people”…
>> Read Part 2 of my interview with Supervisor Eric Mar