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Political Potstickers

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San Francisco’s Champion Bean Counter

By Samson Wong

COUNTING TO 460,000: Former San Francisco GOP political director Chris Bowman has finished an unprecedented painstaking 16-month census of San Francisco voters, including Filipino American and other Asian American voters.

His count found that 15 percent of the District 11 voters are Filipino Americans residing in the Outer Mission, Ingleside and Excelsior neighborhoods along the county line. That estimate is in line with political consultant David Looman’s 1990 calculation of 18,000 Filipino American voters.

Those estimates are dramatically higher than numbers gotten from direct mail firms, which have grossly undercounted the Filipino electorate to 2,000 or less. Filipino Americans are most likely being counted as Latinos because of their Spanish surnames.

Bowman found 50,600 Chinese (11 percent of all voters); 7,600 Vietnamese (1.7 percent), 4,800 Japanese (1.0 percent), 2700 Korean (0.6 percent) in what he described as a conservative, but accurate count. To compare, Chinese American Voters Education Committee and David Binder Research estimates a range from 13 percent to 17 percent Chinese American voters.

The other interesting discovery was 10 percent of the tiny (less than 4,500 voters) but growing Russian voting population was born in Hong Kong or China.

“You had a lot people in their 60s who left the Soviet Union after the [Russian] revolution and then moved after the Chinese Revolution,” said Bowman of the two time refugees.

To arrive at the Asian American counts, Bowman literally eyeballed 460,000 voters three times. Bowman, who drafted this November’s district election boundaries, originally wanted to verify Asian American voter statistics for groups such as the Chinese American Voters Education Committee and to help Republican candidates in District 3 (Chinatown/North Beach). He was tracking Italian voters for Michael Denunzio, Chinese for Rose Chung, and gauging Latino voters who may support appointed incumbent Alicia Becceril.

“It’s like a 16 month gestation period giving birth to a rhinoceros,” said San Francisco’s champion bean counter. “You have to be careful about the horn and hoofs. It was a difficult pregnancy.”

Bowman paid $1,000 to buy a 7,000-page list of 460,000 voters last April 1999 to separate out voters into 10 ethnic categories.

TRUSTING THE TRUSTEES, PART TWO: Last week, I had scribbled about the Deloitte and Touche San Francisco school district audit. In their survey of 460 employee files, they found that one-sixth of employees could not be located, or that they were either over or underpaid. Six employees didn’t exist.

One person who has worked on school audits verified that it was reasonable to extrapolate those figures to the employee workforce. So, potentially one-sixth of the employee workforce may have irregularities. Those employees receive up to $52 million in salaries and benefits. Two-thirds of the $433 million school budget for 1999-2000 paid for teachers and support staff.

School board members Board President Mary Hernandez and Jill Wynns, along with potential supervisor candidates Steve Phillips and Juanita Owens, will have to answer questions about these problems. They will need to resolve the issue of teacher compensation by August 8 when they meet to finalize their budget. In past meetings, teachers, whose starting pay is $29,000, have been demonstrating for a 30 percent raise, but the district has only come up with a 3 percent increase for inflation. Last year over 34800 teachers didn’t get an increase for inflation.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW: After personally signing close to 4,700 letters for his video liquidation sale, Darryl Honda wound up with 700 patrons in the Sunset District video store. He was closing shop, but he was getting a lot of exposure before reopening mid-August with a new sales pitch “Elect him for Supervisor in District 4 (Sunset).”

The 36-year-old Honda, who is of Filipino, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish descent, can’t be taken for granted if he gets his loyal customers to vote. His chances of winning are slim, but he may take votes away from incumbent Supervisor Leland Yee, or challengers Tom Hsieh,Jr., Ron Dudum or John Shanley.

“It’s my way of giving back to my customers,” he said after selling close to two-thirds of his inventory of 10,000 videos, which he could have sold for $30,000 to a wholesaler.

Instead, he got a standing-room only crowd. 4,000 videotapes sold for about two bucks apiece. Meanwhile, Honda passed out campaign signs and pitched his candidacy to the crowd.

“Nobody has cared about the Sunset for a long time,” he said.

YOUR TURN TO FRY ME: E-mail your comments to samson@sfindependent.com or potsticker@prodigy.net. Call too at 415-826-1100, ext. 23.