City Hall Digest: Brooke Jenkins Keeps Fentanyl Dealers Off the Streets, Peskin Elected as Board President, and a $1.4B Price Tag to Solve Homelessness
City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s weekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins Works to Keep Fentanyl Dealers Off the Streets
When District Attorney Brooke Jenkins was appointed to the post last July, one of her core campaign promises was that she would hold fentanyl dealers accountable for posing a grave public health threat to the city. Now, almost seven months later, Jenkins has shown she’s committed to aggressively pursuing measures to keep the most prolific dealers off the streets between when they are arrested and when they are prosecuted.
Jenkins’ office has filed 379 felony narcotics cases since she took office, involving 316 defendants. Of those defendants, 16 have risen to the level of Jenkins flagging them for particular egregiousness and seeking “pretrial detention,” where a defendant is held in jail until their trial. In seven instances, judges in the Superior Court denied the request and released the defendants. However, agreed to hold four people in custody pre-trial and set cash bail for five.
These numbers are undoubtedly small when it’s well-known that there are hundreds of dealers in the downtown core. And, there is a give-and-take between Jenkins’ frontline prosecutors and the Superior Court judges, so a 100 percent success rate is unrealistic to expect in any circumstance. Despite this, it’s heartening to see the District Attorney making progress on one of our city’s most pressing problems.
New Report Says It Would Take $1.4B to Solve SF Homelessness
A new report published by the city’s homeless department says that it would cost $1.4 billion in addition to the existing homeless budget (approximately $667 million) to solve the problem. (The Board of Supervisors had requested the report last year to get a sense of the scope of the problem.)
The report said bringing all 4,300 unsheltered (of the city’s total 7,700 homeless people) inside, plus new ones going forward for three years would require adding 2,250 shelter beds, 3,810 units of permanent housing, as well as “a significant expansion in homelessness prevention services and financial assistance.”
Given the fact this report makes wild assumptions (like, for instance, housing can be built on a whim anywhere in the city, or that creating more shelter space can sail easily through city bureaucracy), it’s more useful as a guide to what is systematically wrong with San Francisco, than as a roadmap on how to solve homelessness.
Supervisor Aaron Peskin Elected as Board President
Last week, the Board of Supervisors took 17 rounds of voting to select a new President of the Board, Supervisor Aaron Peskin. While Peskin’s third term may have caused some insiders to roll their eyes and groan, it’s important to understand just what the Board President is responsible for because they play a significant role in facilitating (or stalling) the Mayor’s agenda. This next year, that agenda consists of increasing housing production, finding solutions for homelessness, confronting drug addiction, and battling a projected $728 million budget deficit.
Most importantly, the Board President has great influence over the legislative process because they assign individual supervisors to committees, which are where bills are heard for the first time. Committee assignments often determine whether a bill can advance to the full Board of Supervisors or not—and, if they survive, how amended they are.
Then, the Board President is also next in line for the mayoralty should something happen to the sitting Mayor. We saw this in action in 2017, as Mayor Ed Lee died of a heart attack mid-term and then-Board President London Breed became acting Mayor.
Finally, the Board President is responsible for running meetings. Supervisor Peskin has a reputation for running focused meetings.