Mayor Gavin Newsom is competitive about many things, garbage included. When the city found out a few weeks ago that it was keeping 70 percent of its disposable waste out of local landfills, he embraced the statistic the way other mayors embrace winning sports teams, improved test scores or declining crime rates.

But the city wants more.

So Mr. Newsom will soon be sending the city’s Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make the recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps mandatory instead of voluntary, on the pain of having garbage pickups suspended.

“Without that, we don’t think we can get to 75 percent,” the mayor said of the proposal. His aides said it stood a good chance of passing.

How does he describe his fixation with recycling dominance? “It’s purposefulness that could otherwise be construed as ego,” Mr. Newsom said. “You want to be the greatest city. You want to be the leading city. You want to be on the cutting edge. I’m very intense about it.”

In a more businesslike tone, Jared Blumenfeld, the director of the city’s environmental programs, addressed one of the main reasons the city keeps up the pressure to recycle. “The No. 1 export for the West Coast of the United States is scrap paper,” Mr. Blumenfeld said, explaining that the paper is sent to China and returns as packaging that holds the sneakers, electronics and toys sold in big-box stores.

Not that Mr. Blumenfeld does not have a competitive streak of his own. San Francisco can charge more for its scrap paper, he said, because of its low levels of glass contamination. That is because about 15 percent of the city’s 1,200 garbage trucks have two compartments, one for recyclables. That side has a compactor that can compress mixed loads of paper, cans and bottles without breaking the bottles. (These specially designed trucks, which run on biodiesel, cost about $300,000 apiece, at least $25,000 more than a standard truck, said Benny Anselmo, who manages the fleet for Norcal.)

Another major innovation in the past decade was the development of infrastructure for turning food wastes — a major part of the waste stream in a city with thousands of restaurants — into baggable compost that is used in California’s vineyards and the vast farms of the Central Valley.

The garbage from San Francisco’s 750,000 residents is picked up on the pay-as-you-throw principle — the more garbage bins you need, the higher your monthly fee. (The average customer pays $23.58 a month.) Also, in the past couple of years, it has banned plastic grocery bags and permitted the recycling of hard plastic toys.

The city has 12 recycling streams, or programs, devoted to different materials, including regular garbage, construction debris, furniture and paint.

“When we look at garbage, we don’t see garbage, O.K.?” said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Norcal Waste Systems, the parent company of Sunset Scavenger and Golden Gate Disposal and Recycling Company, the main garbage collectors in the city. “We see food, we see paper, we see metal, we see glass.”

The recycling rate for this curbside collection from homes, hotels and the city’s 5,000 restaurants is considerably lower than the overall rate, Mr. Reed said, in part because the rates on other waste streams — construction debris or material, like batteries and compact fluorescent bulbs, that the public brings in to special centers — is much higher.

Much of the concrete from demolished buildings, for instance, is recycled in new sidewalks. Another recycling stream is born of the community’s design sensitivities. “People are doing very well here,” Mr. Reed said. “They remodel, and they paint. On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, people line up to bring us paint” at a facility built for the purpose.

“We separate it into flat and latex, screen it to take out the chunks, and blend it in 55-gallon drums,” he said.

The three resulting colors — off-white, beige and green — are packed in five-gallon tins and sent to local nonprofit organizations, schools or charitable institutions in Mexico.

Norcal’s subsidiaries handle 3,545 tons of waste a day in San Francisco, out of about 7,800 generated citywide, Mr. Reed said. About 55 percent of Norcal’s total goes to the landfill; the rest is recycled. These figures become part of the calculation of the city’s overall diversion rate of 70 percent, which is the figure it just reported for 2006.

As John Sitts, of the state’s integrated waste management board, said, “the diversion rate includes recycling, composting and source reduction” — the last term representing “everything businesses and residents do to reuse things rather than throwing them out.”

The Los Angeles region most recently reported a 59 percent diversion rate, a number still being audited by state regulators. San Jose, at 62 percent, claims the best-in-class crown for cities of 900,000 or more. Statewide, the figure for 2006 was 54 percent.

With the exception of Chicago, which boasted a 55 percent rate in 2006 — the most recent year for which national comparisons are available — Eastern and Midwestern cities lagged well behind their California counterparts. According to the most recent annual survey of the trade magazine Waste News, in 2006 New York City was at 30.6 percent, Milwaukee at 24 percent, Boston at 16 percent and Houston at 2.5 percent.

San Francisco’s system is being noticed overseas. Mr. Blumenfeld’s calendar is full of meetings with officials from Germany and China, most of whom visit Norcal’s facilities, including the food-waste composting centers.

His visitors are learning, Mr. Blumenfeld said, that “you can recycle almost anything.”

By Wyatt Buchanan
San Francisco Chronicle

The businesses represent 12,900 employees, more than half of whom are eligible for the Healthy San Francisco program, which currently enrolls 19,000 people. The other employees are eligible for a health-care reimbursement account.

Mayor Gavin Newsom praised the businesses that joined the program and called on others to follow.

"There are still businesses that are not participating, and we want to get them to participate, to get engaged and not look at this as something that is punitive and harmful, but instead something extraordinary and historic," Newsom said.

Businesses that don’t offer health insurance and have staffs of between 20 to 49 people had until Wednesday to meet a city-mandated minimum-spending requirement on health care for their employees. One option to satisfy the city’s requirement was to join the Healthy San Francisco program.

Employers with 50 or more workers had to meet that requirement in January. Together, a total of 734 employers have decided to use Healthy San Francisco to provide health care to their workers.

Every participant in Healthy San Francisco is assigned to a primary-care facility at a health-care center or clinic that stresses preventive care, and enrollees also have access to urgent care, emergency care, mental health care, substance abuse services, radiology, pharmaceuticals and other medical services.

More high-level medical care, such as surgery, is offered at San Francisco General Hospital.

To qualify, an individual must be an adult (children are already covered in San Francisco through another program), uninsured, live in the city and be ineligible for Medicaid or Medi-Cal. It is not called an insurance program because medical care is only available within the city limits.

Employment status, immigration status and pre-existing medical conditions are not factors in coverage. People who do not meet the program’s requirements are eligible for the health-reimbursement accounts, employer-funded accounts that reimburse employees’ medical costs. City officials will contact employees of the businesses and tell them what they are eligible for and how to receive it.

For San Franciscans not working for one of these businesses, the Healthy San Francisco program is open to those making up to three times the federal poverty line, or about $31,000 for a single adult. The city plans to eventually eliminate that limit, but has not set a date to do so.

Some San Francisco employers - led by the restaurant lobby - are fighting the requirements, arguing that federal law prohibits state and local governments from regulating employee benefit plans. In December, a federal judge agreed, but his ruling was put on hold by a panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That panel heard oral arguments on the issue last month and a ruling is pending.

The program is expected to cost about $200 million a year, with a portion of that paid by employers who join. So far, businesses have contributed about $6 million to the program, according to the Department of Public Health.

The head of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which has taken the lead in opposing the requirement, said he does not know of any restaurants that signed up with the city program. Instead, they offered employees other health benefits that satisfy the city law.

"We still believe Healthy San Francisco is a good program that can be funded in a legal and affordable fashion that wouldn’t break the back of small business," said Kevin Westlye, executive director of the association.

Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who crafted the program with Newsom, said the new enrollees show the program is working as intended.

"This is what was supposed to happen and this is what happened," Ammiano said.

Newsom said the program has the potential to become a model for local governments nationwide.

"Cities shouldn’t have to do this, but I’m very proud that our city is doing it," Newsom said.

San Francisco already has more recycling trucks (174) than garbage trucks (147), so the news this week that Mayor Gavin Newsom would like to make it a crime in his city not to recycle isn’t so surprising. But that doesn’t make it any less encouraging.

Many of the most progressive environmental policy initiatives seem to origininate in the Bay Area these days, and this one fits the mold. To help San Francisco reach its self-imposed goal of a 75 percent recycling rate by 2010, Newsom announced on Earth Day that city officials are drafting an ordinance that would require all residents and businesses to recycle paper, plastics and aluminum, and to compost all food scraps and yard waste.

San Francisco wouldn’t be the first city to institute a mandatory recycling program, but it would definitely be the largest. The city already has an astounding 70 percent recycling rate, so the ordinance would essentially be aimed at the stragglers.

And it’s not as if the city plans to levy large fines against the non-compliers, though the penalty that San Francisco has in mind could be just as bad (and smelly). If you don’t recycle, they just might not pick up your trash. As Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle, "When the garbage stays, the impact is rather profound and people change their behavior."

I’ve prepared for my appointment with Mayor Gavin Newsom by stopping at Citizen Cake, a Hayes Valley restaurant where my iced coffee is made with organic milk and my chocolate cream-filled cookies, a sophisticated take on the Oreo, are spiked with fleur de sel. But even the infusion of sugar, caffeine, and sea salt can’t help me keep up with the mayor who, despite being trapped behind his enormous traditional wooden desk, is a bundle of nervous energy as he rattles off the ways in which San Francisco is becoming America’s premier green city.

Newsom uses the word exponentially a lot, as in "exponentially more trees" or  "exponentially more solar." In general, there will be exponentially more of things green and exponentially less of things that are not, such as plastic shopping bags (a ban went into effect last winter) and plastic water bottles. Mayor Newsom has in fact just announced that city employees will have to drink filtered tap water. The mayor, on the day I meet him, is clutching what could be his last bottle of Arrowhead Springs.

But after about 20 minutes of environmental rat-a-tat-tat, the mayor slows down. He grows reflective. "Why do we do all this?" he asks. "Because it’s the right thing to do. Why is it the right thing to do? Well, that’s self-explanatory. Do we also think it creates an environment, literally and figuratively, that attracts people? You better believe it. And that’s important as well. We’re consistently among the top travel destinations in the world. We think people are attracted to the values of this city."

That last point grabs my attention. So people visit San Francisco not because they want to ride the cable cars or tour Alcatraz, but because of the city’s values? The mayor’s assertion strikes me because I’ve been thinking for a while about the future of cities, looking for signs of 21st-century urbanism. I’m not particularly interested in the Dubai model, or the China model, both of which seem to be riffs on old-fashioned ideas about the future being a place where everything is bigger and shinier. No, I’m looking for a city that might correct the excesses of the previous century and come up with new formulas—architectural and otherwise—for the future.

The question I ask myself as I drive into town, feeling smug in my rented Honda Civic Hybrid (San Francisco is second only to Los Angeles in the number of hybrids purchased—practically every other car here is a Prius), is this: How do values inscribe themselves on the urban landscape? Just what might clue you in that this is a highly evolved new-millennium city and not a regressive leftover from the previous era? Also: What exactly does a values-oriented tourist do? What sorts of landmarks should I visit? What new attractions join Coit Tower and the revolving bar at the Hyatt?

My first move is to check in to the Orchard Garden Hotel, which boasts that it’s America’s first LEED-certified property. LEED, as you probably know by now, stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and it is a checklist of strategies for making buildings more sustainable that’s been developed and promoted by an organization called the Green Buildings Council. It’s become widely accepted—developers like having a checklist—and LEED certification is the au courant version of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The Orchard Garden, which opened in late 2006, is built from concrete made of recycled fly ash and sustainably harvested wood. The building is well insulated, energy-efficient, and designed with "soothing, spa-inspired tones." The place pretty much radiates goodness. I find the Scandinavian décor of my room a little bland—it’s all pale wood and leaf patterns—but it is very comfortable, and the location, at Bush and Grant, where Chinatown hits Union Square, is just about perfect.

My second move is to dash down to the Ferry Building, originally completed in  1898 as the main gateway to the city. In 2003, after years of painstaking renovation, it reopened as a foodie haven with more than 30 vendors, selling everything from locally produced olive oil to chocolates. There’s a farmers’ market on Tuesdays and Saturdays where the produce includes California specialties like navel oranges, avocados, and artichokes. The Saturday farmers’ market is over for the day by the time I arrive, so I take a seat at the Hog Island Oyster Bar inside the Ferry Building. I order a half-dozen Sweetwater oysters, harvested in Marin County’s Tomales Bay, and a Scrimshaw Pilsner, brewed up the coast in Fort Bragg. It’s local food, untainted by corporate culture, unsullied by jet travel. Al Green’s greatest hits are playing on the sound system. I’m eating organic, drinking organic, looking out at the bay, listening to Green sing "Love and Happiness," and thinking about how supremely intertwined virtue and pleasure are in this town.

Actually, I think that’s the real draw. People don’t come to San Francisco just for its values, they come because those values are always presented as part of an enviable lifestyle. Later in my visit, I mention to Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters, the inventor of California cuisine and lately a proponent of the Slow Food movement, that while green activism is often identified with things you can’t have—rules and prohibitions—this revolution in dining seems very much to be about pleasure. "It is," she says. "It’s all about bringing people to biodiversity and sustainability through pleasure. By eating heirloom tomatoes, you can be doing exactly the right thing and having the flavor and experience. It’s the best."

But even San Francisco, as alluringly progressive as it often is, does not wholeheartedly embrace change. It can be a confounding place: slow-moving, provincial, and weirdly dysfunctional. I’ve been visiting at regular intervals since I was in college. On my first trip, in the 1970’s, bleary-eyed from nights spent in a series of hellish post-hippie crash pads, I wandered into the lobby of the Embarcadero’s Hyatt, one of the first of those John Portman–designed atrium hotels, and thought that I’d somehow crawled out of the miasma left over from the Summer of Love and into an amazing vision of the future. Later, in 1999, I moved to San Francisco and lived there for three years, from the height of the dot-com boom to the bottom of the bust. Again, I found the city was sometimes excruciatingly stodgy and at other times dizzyingly future-forward.

There’s a spot where you can see this duality, the sleepy old city that refuses to change and the radical, cutting-edge city that is always miles ahead of everyone else. Happily for the values tourist, this spot is a tower with an observation deck, in Golden Gate Park. The De Young Museum, an aggressively 21st-century building by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, completed in 2005, is clad in recycled copper—perforated to shade the building while letting daylight in—which will turn green as the metal patinates. Its café serves food from growers and providers within a 150-mile radius. The art collection is expansive and absorbing. And from the observation deck of the distinctive wedge-shaped tower, a mere 144 feet tall, there’s a panoramic view of San Francisco. Gaze north and the view is of the Richmond district, an endless, timeless, monotonous swath of small-scale pinkish stucco houses. But swivel east and you look directly across the shady Music Concourse at the new Academy of Sciences. Designed by Renzo Piano and scheduled to open in September 2008, it’s got an undulating green roof—an artificial terrain dotted with seven hills, planted with beach strawberries, miniature lupine, and California poppies.

Also in Golden Gate Park, the new Academy of Sciences is expected to be the largest public LEED-certified building in the world. It will have highly efficient heating and cooling systems and natural ventilation; produce a relatively small amount of solar power (5 to 10 percent of the building’s needs); and use recycled materials, including insulation made from blue jeans. Visitors will likely not notice most of the green features, but instead be swept away by the exhibitions, which are to include a multilevel rain forest, the world’s deepest coral-reef tank, and some very imposing snakes. "I think an anaconda goes on this side," says my tour guide, Kip Trexel, the project director for Webcor Builders. The Academy’s living roof, though, will be a crowd-pleaser—a deck will allow visitor access—and also a draw for wildlife, including the threatened San Bruno elfin butterfly.

Another possible harbinger of things to come is the dramatic new San Francisco Federal Building, situated on a stubbornly bleak stretch of Mission Street. Designed by Thom Mayne, of the L.A. firm Morphosis, this is probably the most visible symbol of the new San Francisco. The Federal Building is only 18 stories tall, but is located in an otherwise low-rise part of town, so you can see its asymmetrical silhouette, and the sunshade that looks like an insect’s exoskeleton, from all over town (it’s less omnipresent, however, than One Rincon Hill, a 60-story condo tower that everyone I meet gripes about). At night the Federal Building is illuminated by a James Turrell sculpture, a line of LED’s that starts on the plaza level and traces the contours of its "sky garden." Like many LEED-certified buildings, this one features natural ventilation and has windows that open automatically according to climate conditions. The hallways and most surfaces are cool gray concrete made with 50 percent recycled slag. A series of Ed Ruscha murals was commissioned for the elevator lobbies. The building gives the impression that our federal government is an immensely chic organization, or as my tour guide, Gene Gibson of the General Services Administration, observes, the building is "overly optimistic."

But "overly optimistic" is San Francisco in a nutshell, San Francisco at its best. A friend of mine, architect Mark Jensen, recently won a competition to design a roof garden for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His design, in theory, features lichen-covered walls that "will change color and texture with the passing seasons." Very poetic. Very optimistic. I visit Jensen at his firm’s offices overlooking Market Street. As we look at the SFMoMA renderings, he confesses that no one has ever grown lichen in captivity and he’s not even sure it can be done. And I think, as we discuss his lichen strategy, that we are having an archetypal San Francisco conversation.

During my stay, I go on a series of field trips trying to hammer out an itinerary  for the values tourist, seeking more examples of the local brand of optimism. One of the most impressive is Flora Grubb Gardens, a plant store newly relocated from a vacant lot in the Mission to Bayview, a light-industrial area south of downtown. Proprietor Flora Grubb is well-known for her selection of palm trees, and she also stocks a fascinating collection of plants called Echeveria, desert succulents that look like undersea creatures. She’s using them in a civic project, replanting the median strip of Guerrero Street. "I’m excited to design gardens that don’t need irrigation," Grubb explains.

The building is an airy, light-filled, industrial-style shed designed by architects Bonnie Bridges and Seth Boor, with 72 photovoltaic panels on the roof. Solar energy supplies the needs of the plant nursery and the in-house coffee bar, a branch of Ritual Coffee Roasters that’s a magnet for the neighborhood’s workforce. "Everyone says when the Big One hits, they’re coming here," Grubb says. Not only is the building set on a slab that’s engineered to float if the ground beneath it liquefies in a quake, but the solar-powered espresso machine will keep running no matter what. How 21st-century is that?

Also at the south end of town, I visit SF Recycling & Disposal Inc. Not just because it recycles everything from beer cans to house paint (which its workers pick up in alternatively fueled trucks, remix, and give away to developing nations). And not just because the hilltop behind the big waste-sorting facility is home to a meandering sculpture garden full of rusted springs and discarded soda bottles transformed into aesthetic objects. No, I’m here because the place has an artist-in-residence. I’m given a tour by Paul Fresina, who until recently ran both the hazardous-waste facility and the artist-in-residence program. "We didn’t use to use the word dump, because it was derogatory," he explains. "But now we embrace it." He introduces me to Nemo Gould, the artist of the moment, a lanky, sweet-faced young man in gray coveralls who has been building robots and mad-scientist apparatuses from scavenged materials, including the transformer from a broken neon sign and a shower mat (the source of suction cups for an "octopus" Gould made from curly wooden chairbacks). "Things that are beyond hope, but still have nice parts," Nemo says, adding: "I love it here." Once a month, the public is invited to tour the dump, and quarterly there’s an art exhibition, complete with an opening-night party. Fresina tells me that the dump supplies compost to local vineyards, and they, in turn, supply the wine for the art openings. The dump, I decide, is beyond optimistic. The dump is utopian.

Of course, the most satisfying thing a values tourist—or anyone, for that matter—can do in San Francisco is eat. Zuni Café is a perennial favorite, and at Range, a recent arrival in the Mission District, I dine with friends at the bar. And then there are places that have a defined purpose, such as Farmer Brown, a soul food restaurant in the Tenderloin dedicated to supporting African-American organic farmers, or Yield, a small wine bar—in a rapidly evolving neighborhood called Dogpatch, on the back side of Potrero Hill—which was established to promote organic and biodynamic wines. Here, I get an impromptu lecture on biodynamics. (It has to do with cosmic rhythms.) Later, I have an unaccountably delicious meal at Café Gratitude, a small chain of restaurants specializing in raw vegan cuisine.

What’s fascinating, though, is how this way of eating—virtue commingled with pleasure—has been incorporated into the Bay Area’s version of the mainstream. For example, I keep hearing about a Palo Alto–based management company called Bon Appetit. Its motto: Food services for a sustainable future. The firm runs restaurants and employee cafeterias for tech firms like Intel, Oracle, and Yahoo. All the Bon Appetit chefs, at 450 kitchens nationwide, are obliged to buy 30 percent of their produce from local farms.

I get a tour of the Yahoo cafeteria from Robert Hart, the Bon Appetit executive chef at the Sunnyvale complex. Chef Bob, as he’s known, walks me through what must be the most highly evolved assemblage of steam tables and salad bars on the planet. Sure, there are some suspicious-looking health-food products like Gardein, a form of soy protein made to look like shredded chicken or pork. But the dominant theme at Yahoo is spectacular produce, much of it picked when Chef Bob calls in his daily order. There are portobello-and–red-pepper pizzas topped with microgreens. And there are state-of-the-art hamburgers. "My hamburgers are grass-fed beef from the Painted Hills ranches in Oregon," he says. "My chicken breasts are antibiotic-free. I buy all my herbs organic." The take-out containers, made from corn, are biodegradable, and the disposable cutlery is "spudware," made from potato starch. The oil in the deep-fat fryers is extracted from rice bran, and, Chef Bob notes, "a gentleman picks it up and turns it into biodiesel." Before I leave, he hands me a juicy heirloom apricot, a Blenheim, that is on a list of "endangered foods." It comes from a farm that is "trying to bring back lost items…and one of them is this apricot."

As I wander out of the Yahoo complex, my hands sticky with apricot juice, I can see that Silicon Valley is changing the world in ways I hadn’t quite realized. Of course, this is the capital of the technological revolution, but all the bright young things who work in the tech sector are also transforming the way the rest of us eat every time they have lunch. They are helping to establish a whole new food- distribution economy based on ideas that can be traced directly to the front door of Chez Panisse.

Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971, after trying to figure out how to re-create  the dining experiences she had had in France: "I was looking for flavor," Waters explains, sitting in her office in a little building next to the restaurant. "I wasn’t setting out to find organic produce. I wanted flavor. So I was looking for things in season. Something about the way they were selling food in Chinatown reminded me of France, so I was drawn to that. Seeing fish swimming around in the tanks made me believe that this could be more tasty."

What started with one woman’s passion for flavor has spread. Exponentially. All around Chez Panisse is the Berkeley neighborhood known as the Gourmet Ghetto. A couple of doors down is something called the Epicurious Garden, a kind of rarefied food court. Across the street is the Cheeseboard Pizza Collective, where each day employees make one kind of pizza and sell it until it runs out. The grassy but narrow median strip in the middle of Shattuck Avenue is dotted with pizza eaters.

Waters has come to see food as an engine of social and political change. A few blocks from the restaurant is the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, where, since 1996, Waters has been funding the Edible Schoolyard, teaching children to grow and prepare their own produce. Waters is also a director of Slow Food, a movement that makes connections between food quality, the environment, and social justice.

But ultimately it all comes back to the skillful interweaving of high quality and doing the right thing. Waters and I are sitting at a little marble table. On it is a delicate glass carafe etched with a wreath design and the words chez panisse and still. It’s one of the bottles that the restaurant ordered from Bell’occhio (a local shop) when Waters decided to stop serving bottled water and instead serve filtered tap water, still or sparkling. "It was something I’d always thought about, that I’d wanted to do. Why are we bringing all this water over from Italy?" She didn’t act on that thought until a friend who was publicizing a book about the politics of water suggested that Waters take the leap. "And I said, ‘We’ll do it. We’ll do it now.’"

Later, when I’m dining at Chez Panisse with a friend—deeply immersed in a meal that  starts with North African–style vegetable salads and moves at a measured pace through Alaskan halibut, quail couscous, and a fig tart—I find myself thinking about the water bottle. It’s right there on our table. It’s simply a gorgeous object. It’s certainly prettier than a Pellegrino or Perrier bottle. I realize that Waters has performed alchemy. She’s managed to turn her bottled-water ban from a prohibition to a celebration.

In the future, San Francisco will likely have a plethora of green landmarks. A new Transbay Tower downtown, the height of the Empire State Building, might be topped by a wind turbine. Scheduled completion date: 2014. Treasure Island, in the middle of the Bay, will be developed with a couple of iconic towers, solar and wind-generated power, and a 20-acre organic farm. "The most sustainable, greenest development of its kind in the United States," Mayor Newsom predicts. Scheduled completion date: 2022. Until then, the best symbol of green San Francisco—of the enlightened 21st-century city where virtue and pleasure are one and the same—can be found right here on my dinner table in Berkeley.

San Francisco moved a step closer Wednesday to imposing the country’s most stringent green building codes, regulations that would require new large commercial buildings and residential high-rises to contain such environmentally friendly features as solar power, nontoxic paints and plumbing fixtures that decrease water usage.

City officials estimate that by 2012, the new green building codes could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 60,000 tons and save 220,000 megawatt hours of power and 100 million gallons of drinking water.

The Building Inspection Commission, which oversees building permitting and construction, voted unanimously Wednesday to send the green building standards to the Board of Supervisors. If the supervisors approve the regulations, Mayor Gavin Newsom, who last year convened a task force to study and develop the proposals, has promised to sign them into law.

The rules, if implemented, would be phased in gradually, and developers would have until 2012 to fully comply with the strictest levels of the green building codes.

"George Bush is doing nothing to fight climate change on the national level, but with this groundbreaking ordinance, we’re doing our part on the local level," said Nathan Ballard, a Newsom spokesman. "Many people don’t realize that buildings have a big carbon footprint, and this will help reduce the size of that footprint."

While local builders initially would see the overall cost of their projects increase by as much as 5 percent as a result of the new requirements, they nonetheless applauded the stricter codes.

"One of the best things about it is the fact that it’s a gradual ordinance," said Ken Cleaveland, the director of government and public affairs for the San Francisco Building Owners and Managers Association and a member of Newsom’s green building task force. "When you set a goal and give the industry time to meet that goal, you have a far better chance of succeeding."

New residential high-rises taller than 75 feet, new commercial buildings larger than 5,000 square feet and renovations on buildings larger than 25,000 square feet would have to comply with the environmentally friendly building standards known as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED. The standards were developed by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Buildings are given certified silver, gold or platinum LEED ratings depending on how many green features they incorporate and their energy efficiency.

All new residential construction would have to comply with another nationally accepted standard, known as GreenPoint Rated, which requires home builders to use such features as paint made from recycled materials and solar-powered water-heating systems.

"The goals that are stated here are all achievable and something that we have to work to develop in our building code," Building Inspection Commissioner Vahid Sattary said during Wednesday’s meeting in City Hall.

Boston is the only large U.S. city that has imposed strict environmental standards for private construction, but its mandate is not as far-reaching as San Francisco’s proposal.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, a vocal Newsom critic, signaled his support and agreed to allow a similar green building measure he had introduced last year to be incorporated into the mayor’s proposal.

"It is a societal imperative that we start doing this in new construction in San Francisco and help lead the nation and reduce the carbon footprint in San Francisco," Peskin said.

He expressed concern, however, that the legislation doesn’t go far enough to protect existing buildings, especially historic ones.

"The greenest building that exists today is one that is already built," he said. "I want to make sure this does not become a license to demolish existing buildings."

Jennifer Matz, managing deputy director of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said city officials had hoped to offer incentives to builders whose projects reached the highest levels of environmental performance. In the end they decided against that idea because they feared it could lead to developers unnecessarily tearing down buildings or remodeling structures in order to take advantage of incentives.

"What we have now is legislation that says if you’re going to build, you have to build to this standard. But it doesn’t encourage you to build a green building in lieu of keeping your existing building," she said.

To get involved

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will consider stringent new building codes designed to reduce the environmental impact of development. To find contact information for your elected supervisor, log on to links.sfgate.com/ZCHU.

Making your building green

New building standards under consideration by San Francisco officials would allow developers to choose the best ways to make their buildings green. Some tactics suggested by the U.S. Green Building Council:

Wood: Use types certified as sustainably harvested.

Light: Use windows so nearly all spaces can by lit by daylight.

San Francisco is joining a list of cities and counties that will be using only 100% recycled paper.

Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered all city departments Tuesday to purchase only the recycled office paper for use by the city.

San Francisco now joins nine other cities and counties in California, including Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego, that also only purchase 100% recycled paper.

Before Newsom issued his executive order, San Francisco agencies were required to buy office paper made from at least 30% recycled materials. Officials say by using the recycled paper, the 10 cities and counties will save about 67,000 trees a year.

Now, California First Lady Maria Shriver is following San Francisco’s lead and expanding San Francisco’s program statewide. We applaud the First Lady’s program to help all Californians claim the tax dollars they are entitled to and encourage all Californians to visit her website, WeConnect.net, which offers information not only about the Earned Income Tax Credit, but also other programs that are available to low income Californians.  Visit www.weconnect.net today, and find out what the state of California can do for you!

With a stormy financial front headed toward San Francisco schools, Mayor Gavin Newsom offered to help the district Friday with $30.6 million from the city’s rainy day fund.

Facing a $40 million shortfall, district officials were preparing for massive layoffs and program cuts - including cutting more than 500 teachers and staff.

"This is perilous," the mayor said of the potential impact. "This is ominous. This is simply not acceptable."

Newsom’s proposal must be approved by the Board of Supervisors.

In 2003, city voters passed Proposition G, which required the city save excess revenue during good economic times.

The account now holds about $122 million, with the school district eligible for up to 25 percent of the total if two conditions are met: The school district must be getting less money per pupil from the state when adjusted for inflation, and must be facing significant teacher layoffs.

City and school officials said based on current budget projections, there is no question the district will meet that criteria.

A few supervisors have already said they would support the idea.

"Needless to say, it is raining on the San Francisco school district," Supervisor Bevan Dufty said Thursday during a joint committee meeting with school board members on the topic.

Supervisor Sophie Maxwell said during bad economic times, everyone takes their shoes off and puts their feet on the table. The one with the most holes in their socks gets help.

"We cannot allow (the schools) to feel this to that extent," she said.

The announcement at Mission High School on Friday morning was unexpected, given the mayor’s position Thursday evening that it was still premature to consider allocating money to the schools from the city’s reserve. He said Friday that he had just received recent city budget numbers, with new information on what was available for the schools from the reserve.

School Superintendent Carlos Garcia said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed cuts are unimaginable and unacceptable.

If the governor doesn’t revise his budget for the better, suing the state wouldn’t be out of the question, even though San Francisco city coffers would help cover the shortfall this year, Garcia said.

"I would consider a lawsuit against the state of California for failure to provide sufficient funds for an adequate education," he said.

In the meantime, it could take city officials some time to go through the process of allocating the rainy day funds to the schools.

Schools are required by state law to notify staff and teachers of a possible layoff by March 15 and confirm that by May 15. Those first pink slips will probably still go out, but the vast majority could be rescinded if the rainy day fund comes through.

Local officials said they are still hoping the proposed state cuts won’t come to pass, but noted it’s important to be prepared for the worst. The rainy day money allows the district to know it’ll be financially secure no matter what happens in Sacramento.

"If we don’t need it, we’ll give it back," Garcia said.

The mayor initially announced at the news conference that he’d support giving the schools $29.5 million from the fund if necessary, but revised that later Friday to reflect the entire 25 percent apportionment allowed under the law.

Several high school principals and assistant principals - who were meeting at Mission High - attended the news conference. It was a staff workday, with students off.

The principals cheered as Newsom announced the rainy day reprieve.

Burton High School Principal Bill Kappenhagen looked happy and weary as the news conference broke up. He said he hadn’t slept in four days thinking about how he’d slash $600,000 from his school’s budget next year, based on estimates the district had announced to administrators Monday.

Kappenhagen hadn’t told his teachers and staff yet about the cut. He scheduled a staff meeting for Monday, when he planned to tell them that nearly eight teachers would have to go, as well as supplies and who knows what else.

He blew out a sigh of relief Friday, knowing he would never have to break that news.

"It means I’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep," Kappenhagen said through a big smile. "It’s a huge relief."