Emergency Services chief blasted by supes - Alioto-Pier wants answers, Daly wants Conroy out

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 9/21/5 | Charlie Goodyear, Kevin Fagan

[SmithL]

Annemarie Conroy, the director of San Francisco's Office of Emergency Services, was in the political hot seat Tuesday with one member of the Board of Supervisors calling for an inquiry into her management of the office and another urging her to resign.

Several supervisors said that learning over the past week that Conroy was attending homeland security classes at the prestigious Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey raised old concerns that she lacked enough training to lead San Francisco's disaster agency. And though Conroy by some accounts has improved the emergency office since taking over, the debacle of hurricane relief efforts in New Orleans has spurred officials here to ensure that San Francisco is prepared.

To that end, Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier sent a letter of inquiry Tuesday to Conroy asking her how often she is out of town attending classes, who runs her office in her absence and whether she has been at school while Mayor Gavin Newsom is out of town on a sister-city trip to Ireland.

"I think that when you are furthering your education that is a great step in the right direction, but we need to make sure we are not in a position here where our director is beginning her education," Alioto-Pier said. "I would like to know who is in charge of OES when our director of OES is not in San Francisco."

The supervisor is a member of the city's Disaster Council, made up of officials from a variety of city departments. The council had not met for about five years before Conroy took her job in 2004, but it has met four times since she came on. However, Alioto-Pier said Tuesday that the council had not convened since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

[SmithL]

San Francisco's Politburo is demanding ignorance from its leaders.

[frankjr]

The SF Board is the biggest collection of idiots running a city east of the Pacific. They are more concerned about taxpayer funding of city worker sex changes and ensuring hobos have a right to crap in the middle of the sidewalk. Their waste of funds has driven that city's infrastucture into the ground. They better hope the big one doesn't hit.

Plus they are still working on retrofitting the Bay Bridge from the Loma Prieta earthquake back in 1989. If they were in charge of N.O. rebuilding, it would take at least 100 years.