City Hall Digest: Business Presence Continues to Shrink, Supervisors Reignite Debate on Mayoral Power, and The Wide Reach of the Drug Crisis

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.

Businesses Fleeing SF Leave a Gaping Hole in the City Budget

The city’s largest economic drivers in the tech industry have been vacating their SF office space at an astonishing pace in order to cut costs in the order of tens of millions. Now companies outside tech are shrinking, too, including San Francisco staple Gap, which just announced last week it will downsize its flagship Banana Republic store in Union Square. 

Gap is also trimming its office space dedicated to Athleta, a subsidiary brand. They’re closing the Union Square location this spring and will also seek to sell or lease Athleta’s headquarters located at 1 Harrison Street. 

All of these recent closures, shrinkages, and layoffs mean less tax revenue funding the vital social services the city provides to address our most pressing issues. Additionally, these vacancies are a large part of the reason San Francisco is facing a $728 million budget shortfall over the next two years. 

It’s been over a year since we started seeing these sort of downsizing moves—and yet the city has not revealed any sort of meaningful plan to stimulate downtown recovery. San Francisco needs to get creative when it comes to bringing people back downtown, and should also look at how heavily it taxes our largest employers.

City Hall Debates Whether the Mayor Holds Too Much Power

Does the Mayor of San Francisco have too much control over the city? Or has she lost control, yet shoulders the blame for a dysfunctional city? It depends on who you ask. Last week the Board of Supervisors considered a proposal to ban the Mayor from soliciting unsigned resignation letters from commissioners.

Let’s remember one key thing about commissions: not one of the hundreds of unelected volunteers who make broad decisions on how the city operates are accountable to voters. Sometimes, they don’t even report to the person who appointed them to their position. Last year, it was reported that Mayor Breed had about 50 of her appointees sign undated resignation letters and return them to her staff. While that might look like shady back-room dealing, the unsigned resignation letter practice was a Band-Aid the Mayor was slapping on a broken system in order to maintain some level of needed control over her commissioners.

The revelations caused an uproar from good government watchdogs, but others, like Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, had a more pragmatic take on the mayor’s accountability method: generally, Mandelman sees “a government that seems incredibly disunified, running through a number of commissions that, you know, seem to be quite independent.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement for commissions.

Commission reform is one of our five solutions to cleaning up City Hall and fixing San Francisco. Want to read about the rest? Click here.

It’s Good That Schools Have Narcan Now. It’s Also Wild That They Have To.

San Francisco Unified School District has received 36 kits of Narcan from the Naloxone Distribution Project, a state program that aims to tamp down overdose deaths in the state from fentanyl or drugs cut with fentanyl. 

Though the district has received the kits, it is unclear which schools specifically will carry the drug, which is frustrating to parent advocates like Tanya Tilghman with Mothers Against Drug Addiction and Death. Tilghman has repeatedly called on SFUSD to publicly say which schools have Narcan and are trained to administer it. 

Narcan saves lives. It’s good that schools have it. And, it’s crazy that schools have to have it. It shows us just how prevalent fentanyl really is, and how normalized the drug crisis has become. 

TogetherSF Action is making advocating for an end to the drug epidemic in San Francisco a top priority this year. Our first step? Flooding inboxes at City Hall. We need thousands of concerned San Franciscans to send letters to their leaders demanding they end open-air drug markets in 2023. Are you in?