City Hall Digest: Breaking Down the Mayor’s New Proposals and a Reversal for Supervisor Ronen on Street Vending

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.

Mayor’s Ballot Measure Proposals Are Political, But Still Practical

Last week, Mayor London Breed unveiled three new ballot measures focused on some of our city’s biggest issues—economic recovery, the drug crisis, and public safety. While we wish these policies went a bit further and were implemented earlier, overall these measures propose practical solutions to these problems.

They may be practical, but they are equally as political of a move on the Mayor’s part. With last year’s School Board and District Attorney recalls, the political climate in San Francisco right now is more populist than it's been in years, and the public support for these measures make their passage likely. But the Mayor is also using these measures to shore up voters’ confidence in her ability to get things done with a major election looming next year. New polling shows elected officials across the board are unpopular right now. If these moves are successful, it would go a long way toward improving those numbers. 

Let’s dive in and examine what these three measures cover, and what they aim to solve. 

Public Safety

This proposal tackles a wide range of issues the Mayor says currently prevent police from effectively doing their jobs—these are also policies San Francisco objectively needs. At a high level, the measure covers three areas: law enforcement’s use of technology; limiting the power of the Police Commission; and streamlining administrative work for officers. 

Looking deeper, this measure would relax the current rules governing police pursuits, allowing the use of drones in active investigations and pursuits, allowing police to engage in vehicle pursuits, and also allowing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for pursuits. The measure would also streamline the requirements when SFPD installs new security cameras, and allow SFPD to use surveillance technology for up to one year before needing to submit policy on its use to the Board of Supervisors.

Both Mayor Breed and Chief of Police Bill Scott say that SFPD is currently hampered by city regulations, and behind comparable police departments in their ability to use new technology to fight crime. Critics like the ACLU of Northern California say that the measure would roll back guardrails meant to keep the police in check—this is the same ACLU, by the way, that is suing the city to prevent it from removing tent encampments.

This measure also aims to reduce paperwork that the Mayor and the Chief say keep officers behind desks and off the streets. It would allow officers to use bodycam footage to satisfy reporting requirements instead of doing paperwork, while also changing the use-of-force policy to allow bodycam footage to satisfy this reporting element. It would require the Police Commission to consider any administrative burdens on staff time before changing policies or procedures, dictating that officers spend no more than 20 percent of their working time on administrative tasks (outside of legally-mandated duties like arrest reports, booking etc).

Finally, the measure seeks to limit the Police Commission’s considerable oversight powers by requiring the commission to post advance notice of any proposals to change departmental policy before they actually make the changes—which they are not currently required to do. Then, a 90-day process starts with community input meetings on the commission’s proposed changes. The Mayor’s office has criticized the Police Commission for being controlled by people who govern “by ideology and personal interest, not by public safety or policing best practices.” This new requirement is an attempt to hold the oversight commission accountable to the public before they go ahead and change department policy.

Economic Recovery

This proposal aims to stimulate downtown’s recovery and longevity by making it more attractive to convert office buildings into residential buildings. While they may sound simple, these conversions are expensive. Complicated plumbing and electrical renovations are often necessary to make offices into living spaces. When San Francisco’s lengthy and expensive permitting bureaucracy is added to construction costs, most proposals wouldn’t make sense.

This measure would waive the six percent transfer tax that sellers are required to pay on real estate transactions over $25 million. This means that building owners who convert their buildings to housing could sell the property without paying the six percent transfer tax—and according to an analysis by SPUR, San Francisco’s transfer tax is the highest of any major city in California. Developers argue that, because of the impact to returns when the building is sold, the tax acts as a roadblock to feasibility. 

With downtown recovery efforts beginning to show mild gains, the Mayor is betting that the short-term loss of tax revenue will be offset by long-term development and an influx of residents. 

Will this help make downtown a vibrant, livable neighborhood? A list of narrow requirements that projects have to abide by in order to qualify for the waiver puts that in question—still, we applaud the effort.

Drug Crisis

This proposal would implement drug addiction screening for people on the County Adult Assistance Program (CAAP, also known as General Assistance or “welfare”) who wish to continue receiving monthly cash assistance. General Assistance recipients would not be drug tested—instead they would be professionally screened for substance use disorders and required to enter appropriate treatment. People who refuse to enter treatment would lose out on monthly cash stipends, but still be eligible to receive money for housing support. 

When it was first proposed, the idea was controversial among elected officials in San Francisco, but Mayor Breed says this coverage has been misconstrued.

Keep an eye out for these measures and more as the March 5, 2024 election draws closer—we’ll cover everything in more detail in our comprehensive voter guide.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen Changes Course, Ends Street Vending on Mission Street

In a letter to her constituents last week, District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen announced that the city would ban street vending on Mission Street. This ban comes in response to reports that some Public Works employees, fearing for their safety, chose to wear bulletproof vests when enforcing the city’s vending laws. Additionally, some Public Works employees had been threatened or assaulted while working along the corridor. 

This is a notable change of heart for Ronen, who has historically called for less enforcement and supported the movement to defund the police. One could even argue that Ronen is partially to blame for the situation along the corridor after she tried to resolve the situation with toothless solutions. Has Ronen finally decided to listen to her constituents over activist interests, or is this political chess?

Supervisor Ronen has termed out and is ineligible for re-election next year, so it may be the former. Unfortunately, this reversal is too little, and way too late. Mission District constituents have been asking for a resolution to the untenable situation on Mission Street for years now, with no workable solution being presented by Supervisor Ronen. Only after street vending became truly unmanageable, with city workers being attacked, did Ronen call for a vendor shutdown on the Mission Street corridor.

We encourage elected officials to update their policies when they learn new information, but in an ideal world, they work efficiently to scrap solutions that are clearly leading to unworkable, unsustainable outcomes.