City Hall Digest: Peskin Dusts Off Familiar Playbook to Confuse Voters
City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s biweekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right and duty.
Peskin Broke Our Oversight System. He Can’t Be Trusted to Fix It.
Last week, Aaron Peskin announced a slew of new city charter amendments, including two measures he says will reform San Francisco’s commission system. Reforming the city’s oversight committees? That sounds pretty familiar. In fact, the ballot measure committee sponsored by TogetherSF Action has been gathering signatures for months to get our sponsored measure to reform the commission system on the November ballot. Surely, this is just a coincidence.
Aaron Peskin has been a supervisor in San Francisco for 16 years now, and he’s responsible for creating many of the commissions that exist today. That may be why, unlike the measure sponsored by TogetherSF Action, neither of Peskin’s measures actually set a cap on the number of commissions in San Francisco. Without a cap, it’s not clear how effective either measure would be at actually making city government more efficient—both of his measures create committees to make recommendations about which commissions to cut or combine, but don’t go much farther than that.
Peskin’s playbook is pretty easy to recognize once you’re paying attention. First, there needs to be a threat to his authority. Then, Peskin introduces legislation that sounds good on its face, but actually cancels out the other legislation.
Take Proposition D in 2022. Prop D was designed to make it easier to build housing in San Francisco by removing some bureaucratic hurdles—like requiring supervisor approval for new homes. Aaron Peskin has shown again and again that he doesn’t want more housing in San Francisco (at least not in his backyard), and taking away his ability to extract concessions from developers would have removed a good chunk of his power. So once Prop D was introduced, Peskin co-sponsored and backed Proposition E, the “Affordable Housing Production Act,” which would have made building affordable housing more difficult. The competing measures confused voters enough that both went down to defeat—which was Peskin’s strategy all along.
Peskin’s commission reform measures for the November election is straight out of his “confuse voters with competing legislation” playbook, so it’s important to know the difference. TogetherSF Action’s commission reform measure is based on research from the non-partisan good government think tank the Rose Institute at Claremont College and is narrowly targeted to fix one of the biggest inefficiencies in San Francisco’s government—it’s not clear if Aaron Peskin based his measure on much more than *vibes*.
Our sponsored measure would update the city charter to reduce the number of commissions by roughly half, and cap the number of commissions in San Francisco at 65. Streamlining and combining duplicative commissions is one of the biggest changes San Francisco can make to make City Hall operate more effectively. It ensures a significant portion of San Francisco commissions are advisory only. Unelected commissioners shouldn’t be making major judgments around critical issues in our city—elected officials should. Finally, this measure would allow the authority who appoints a commissioner to directly remove a commissioner. That’s important, because commissioners involved in illegal or unethical activities have stayed in their seats, because their misdeeds didn’t technically meet the level needed for removal.
One important point—our sponsored measure doesn’t directly decide most of the existing commissions to cut, combine, or retain. Instead, through a public process, it creates a task force of San Franciscans to review the city’s existing commissions and recommend which ones to streamline. This is an important restructuring effort for the government, so it’s important to devote the resources necessary to make sure it’s successful.
While we appreciate Aaron Peskin amplifying the need to reform San Francisco’s broken commission system, his ballot measure is a cynical ploy, designed to confuse voters and maintain the status quo. Peskin is the architect of San Francisco's bloated, ineffective oversight commissions—he can’t be trusted to fix it. If Aaron Peskin gets his way with his measure, he’ll point to it as an example of good government reform—but it’s one that won’t improve anything at all.
San Francisco’s Homelessness Count is Confusing by Design
San Franciscans following the city’s homeless crisis probably felt something close to whiplash last week when news about the city’s homelessness rate broke. First, city officials celebrated the fact that San Francisco’s population of people living on the street fell 13 percent since the last Point-in-Time count in 2022. Shortly afterward, more data came out, and the full picture became clearer—overall homelessness in San Francisco is actually *up* seven percent since 2022.
With the exception of the aforementioned drop in tents on the street, homelessness in the city is up in almost every category since 2022. The number of homeless families is up 94 percent, the number of people living in vehicles is up 37 percent, and chronic homelessness (unhoused people with a disability like substance use disorder or mental illness) is up nine percent.
So why the mixed messages? Is this a case of “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” or is it something more nuanced?
The messy data is partly due to the way cities in the United States track homelessness. The Point-in-Time (PiT) count is a biannual, volunteer-driven manual count of the homeless population throughout the country. As you might imagine, using volunteers to try and hand count unhoused people is not the most accurate method, but it’s the one mandated by the federal government. Making matters worse, San Francisco has been sloppy when training volunteers for the count, requiring recounts and questions about the integrity of the city’s numbers.
There are real issues with the PiT count—it’s been criticized for focusing on visibly homeless people, while overlooking people who are unhoused, but living in vehicles or somewhere other than a street. But since every city in the US uses this methodology, all the data is likely flawed in similar ways.
Elected officials are always going to highlight data that show they’re doing a good job, while diminishing data that shows otherwise. In this case, the numbers show that homelessness in San Francisco is up—full stop. San Francisco’s elected officials need to be honest about that, or we’re never going to solve the homelessness crisis.
SFPD Officer is Either the Hardest Working Employee in Town, or Scamming the System
San Francisco is expensive, and plenty of people have a side hustle to make ends meet. That’s usually not a problem, unless you’re a San Francisco police officer who also runs an unregistered private security company. That’s when things tip into conflict-of-interest territory, and it’s why SFPD officer Jason Johnson might be the subject of a potential investigation from San Francisco’s Police Commission.
In addition to Johnson’s full-time job as a police officer and his time spent running a small business, according to tax filings he also works 40 hours a week at Operation Genesis, the nonprofit he founded in 2016. Rise and grind, indeed!
SFPD requires its employees to register any paid work they do outside of their regular job, and Johnson didn’t register his nonprofit or his security company. The department says it investigated Johnson’s work with Operation Genesis last year, and because the nonprofit’s funding primarily came from the City of San Francisco, not the police department, there wasn’t a conflict of interest. But the department also admitted they didn’t fully address all the allegations against Johnson, which is why Police Commissioner Max Carter-Obserstone is calling for a new investigation after news about Johnson’s security company came to light.
Obviously, people can do what they want with their free time. If Jason Johnson is actually working two, possibly three, full-time jobs, he’s a testament to the American entrepreneurial spirit. But city employees are paid with taxpayer dollars, and San Francisco needs to make sure it’s spending that money wisely and not being taken advantage of.
Corruption and conflicts of interest can develop pretty easily when a city employee has another income stream that’s also dependent on the city. SFPD is already dealing with fallout from the SF SAFE scandal, where another nonprofit with close ties to the police department spent taxpayer money on lavish parties instead of its mission. Full-time city employees already receive healthy pensions, paid by taxpayers. They shouldn’t also be eligible for city contracts. That’s essentially double-dipping, with San Franciscans’ money.
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Democrats Beware: A Progressive DA Fights for His Job — in Hipster Portland
Jonathan Martin - Politico
“Interesting article that highlights the backlash against ideology over effectiveness. A few years ago, there was a wave of progressive-minded District Attorneys winning elections in deep blue places like Portland and San Francisco. A few years later, people are coming to terms with what their policies look like in action, and reconsidering their decisions."
Read the article here.
Paid for by TogetherSF Action (tsfaction.org). Not authorized by any candidate or committee controlled by a candidate. Financial disclosures are available at sfethics.org.