LIVININTHELOIN

City residents shouldn’t get too excited about the latest eruption from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ own Mount Vesuvius: Chris Daly. His idea to close miles of Market Street from The Embarcadero to Hayes Valley – as part of a slap at Mayor Gavin Newsom’s own Sunday road shutdown plan – was just one of many offhand musings he floated this week to disrupt normal city proceedings.

At Tuesday’s board hearing, in which he was the only supervisor to vote against passage of The City’s swallow-inducing $6.5 billion budget, the blustery Daly raised the idea of eliminating nearly 60 new department manager positions so he could have more money to spend on his pet projects.

After the supervisor’s windy treatise about ways to magically make millions of dollars in revenue appear, his colleagues did what most people should do about Daly’s plan – ignore it.

Closing Market Street to cars has been a part of random muttering among politicians for years. Former Mayor Willie Brown raised the proposal some years back and it went the same way as his idea to use heat-seeking helicopters in Golden Gate Park to find homeless campers.

There even was an idea floated among a tiny group of gay activists to rename Market Street in honor of the late Harvey Milk – until it was pointed out that Milk has so many things named for him in The City it was all a bit much. Expect this idea to vanish just as quickly. [SF Examiner]