City Hall Digest: State Lawmakers Tackle Petty Crime, Judge Bans Encampment Clearing, and Nonprofits Spend City Funds Unchecked

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.

State Lawmakers Are Taking on Petty Crime—Or Trying To

A new state bill by Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance) could make policing the city’s retail theft problem a whole lot easier, if it passes a gauntlet of obstacles. Muratsuchi’s bill would amend Proposition 47, a 2014 law which reduced penalties for low-level offenses, and said that theft under $950 was petty theft. It also created a new misdemeanor for shoplifting for any commercial property taken under $950. 

Muratsuchi’s bill would lower that $950 threshold significantly, to $400. This would mean that offenders could be more easily charged with felonies—this could have wide-ranging implications for San Francisco, as residents see open-air markets of stolen goods at BART stations on a daily basis and larceny theft has risen by 10 percent in the past year.

At the time of its passage, Prop 47 was hailed as a progressive move toward decarceration by politicians, but has endured lasting and repeated criticism from those who feel that the law has given criminals a green light to commit theft with impunity. Despite the criticism, Democrats at the state level have not dared to touch Prop 47 to avoid being perceived as “tough on crime.” 

At the same time, legislators have become aware that the public is starting to tire of rising petty crime in California’s cities. We’ll see just how tired they are as Muratsuchi’s bill moves through the legislature. It must pass with a two-thirds majority before facing California voters at the ballot box. 

Judge Bans the City From Clearing Homeless Camps as Coalition on Homelessness Lawsuit Moves Ahead

Recently, the Coalition on Homelessness filed a lawsuit against San Francisco to stop encampment sweeps and police enforcement of quality-of-life laws that target people living on the streets, like the city’s law that says tents occupying sidewalk space is illegal. The ultimate goal of the lawsuit is to force the city to create enough housing for the homeless population. 

Over the holidays, the judge hearing the case moved a step in the activists' direction by temporarily banning the city from clearing homeless camps. In her decision, the judge cited a poor defense by the city of their clearing practices, and the fact that the city failed to defend itself from allegations that it was clearing camps without offering people shelter space. 

In response, the city now claims it is facing dueling orders regarding tent clearing: they are relying on a 2020 settlement with UC Hastings which required the city to clear encampments in the Tenderloin. The city says they are still compelled by that settlement to clear camps. 

While pressuring the city to provide adequate shelter beds seems noble, the Coalition on Homelessness has regularly opposed the city creating such new shelter space, or anything other than permanent housing units for homeless people. However, they are suing the city to stop encampment sweeps because the city is failing to offer shelter space. This creates a cycle of non-solutions in which the city and vocal advocacy groups duke it out over technicalities while residents—both housed and unhoused—suffer from unsafe street conditions. 

Regardless of the result of the lawsuit, we’d rather have seen the city and the Coalition on Homelessness agree on workable solutions instead of wasting more time and money on a legal battle.

City Doles Out Over $1B for Contractors to Help Solve Homelessness and Other Issues—With No Accountability Metrics

San Francisco spent over a billion dollars this year on contracts with nonprofits to address serious issues like homelessness and behavioral health, but it often feels like the money is being spent in a vacuum with no visible change. Additionally, because the city does not have a cohesive performance review plan for contracts, contractors can continue to get city dollars without having to actually affect change. 

Between June 2022 and June 2023, the city is distributing a total of $1.4 billion across 600 nonprofits. The money is allocated for programs like providing indigent legal services to people or managing supportive housing for homeless people. Of that sum, the city has budgeted $667.8 million toward homeless services and $75 million for drug health and treatment programs during the 2022 fiscal year. However, San Francisco still sees the death toll from opioid addiction rising, business coalitions refusing to pay their taxes due to high crime in their districts, and homeless encampments in nearly every neighborhood.

With so much money being spent on programs to combat these problems, who’s holding these nonprofits accountable?

Technically, the Controller’s Office is responsible for ensuring, via audit, that the nonprofit organizations are in good financial health (i.e. they have solid recordkeeping, are not in debt, and have strong operational practices). This year’s audit found that several contractors were in severe financial trouble or were apparently corrupt. However, 88 percent of the city’s contractors were operating at acceptable levels.

A noteworthy shortcoming of this annual audit is the fact that the Controller’s Office is not responsible for ensuring that contractors are meeting their goals or actively affecting change. This is because individual departments are responsible for overseeing performance. As a result, there are differing standards for contractors across departments. As it stands now, the only performance metric the nonprofits must meet is whether or not they are providing the services they said they would. With no oversight as to whether or not they’ve made meaningful change in their issue areas, the nonprofits still continue to receive city funding.