After Mayorship
After leaving the mayor's office, Brown considered running for the State Senate but ultimately declined. From January 2006 through September 2006, Brown co-hosted a morning radio show with comedian Will Durst on a local San Francisco Air America Radio affiliate. He also makes a weekly podcast. Brown also established The Willie L. Brown, Jr. Institute on Politics & Public Service, an unaffiliated nonprofit organization at San Francisco State University. The center trains students for careers in municipal, county and regional governments. The center will be one of the first to focus on local government in the country. Brown gave the center's library a collection of his artifacts, videotapes and legislative papers from his forty years in public office. He is also planning to mentor students, teach a course on leadership, and recruit guest speakers.
On February 5, 2008, Simon and Schuster released Brown's hardcover auto-biography, Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times, with collaborator P. J. Corkery. The book release coincided with California's Democratic Presidential Primary on the same day. On July 20, 2008, Brown began writing a column for the San Francisco Chronicle, a move that has drawn the ire of some Chronicle staffmembers and ethicists for the failure to disclose the multiple conflicts of interest Brown has.
In 2009, Brown is defending general construction contractor Monica Ung, 49 of Alamo, California. Accused of flouting labor laws and defrauding immigrant construction workers of their wages from laboring on Oakland municipal construction projects, Ung was arraigned for dozens of felony fraud charges on 24 August 2009 in Alameda County Superior Court. Brown's decision to defend Ung angered many in the East Bay's labor community.
Read more about this topic: Willie Brown (politician)