City Hall Digest: Supes Crack Down On Sideshows and Nonprofit Spending

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.

Sideshows Become the Main Show in New Legislation that Increases Penalties for Stunt Driving

District Six Supervisor Matt Dorsey introduced legislation last week calling upon the state to increase penalties for drivers caught participating in sideshows. The board of supervisors passed it 10 to 1 (with Supervisor Dean Preston dissenting), affirming the city’s recognition that sideshows pose a threat to public safety.

Sideshows are a long-held Bay Area tradition and usually include dozens of vehicles gathering to perform stunt driving like donuts in wide intersections or near freeway ramps. They’ve been highlighted in songs by Bay Area artists like Too $hort, Mac Dre, and E-40. 

The bottom line is traffic stunts are extremely dangerous, as demonstrated in this video. Especially since they are also a gateway to fights, gun violence, and destruction of public property—not to mention they are by definition reckless driving. This viral photo of a woman hanging out of a window with an AK-47 at a 2021 San Francisco sideshow wasn’t the city’s best look.

We’re glad the board of supervisors took decisive action on this.

SFPD Policy on Pretextual Stops Headed to Further Consideration

After three months, a working group made up of law enforcement officers, experts, and police reform advocates concluded work on a potential new policy for the San Francisco Police Department that aims to reduce racial bias in traffic enforcement. The policy would ban pretextual stops, which are traffic stops often used as pretext for vehicle searches and drug confiscations. SFPD could still cite people for these infractions, but they would have to mail citations to offenders instead of approaching them in their cars. Officers in this working group opposed the idea of having a list, saying that the working group was not the correct body to discuss what laws they could and could not enforce with stops. 

How could this help prevent racial profiling? Critics say pretextual stops are often unfairly biased against people of color. Disentangling pretextual stops from dangerous traffic violations like speeding and reckless driving is important because it will help our city find a solution to both traffic violence and racial bias in police work.

Reporting from Mission Local shows that pretextual stops aren’t actually that common in San Francisco. Out of approximately 3,500 stops in 2022’s first quarter, officers reported 19 stops for tinted windows. Four vehicles stopped for tinted windows were searched, and only three ended up with citations or arrests. Officers reported fewer than 15 stops for failing to use a turn signal and five stops for littering. Two were questioned for sleeping in a parked car. None of these stops led to police violence, but Mission Local points out that they also didn’t lead to “discovery of contraband or illegal activity.”

Next, the proposal is headed to the Human Rights Commission for a series of public feedback sessions on it. Then, the Police Commission will review the policy. Want to weigh in? Find a meeting below, or view them all and find remote joining information at this link:

• November 8 at 5pm | African American Art and Culture Complex 

• November 10 at 5pm | Human Rights Commission

• November 15 at 5:30pm | Samoan Community Development Center 

• November 16 at 6pm | Booker T. Washington Community Service Center 

Catherine Stefani Gets the Ball Rolling on (Real) Nonprofit Spending Oversight 

District Two Supervisor Catherine Stefani began the process last week of legislating a set of standards including performance monitoring and transparency that could be uniformly applied to all of the city’s nonprofit contractors. San Francisco spends billions of dollars on nonprofits to provide services that the city does not have reach to do. The city also has very poor, mismatched efforts to oversee this spending—take, for example, the recent kerfuffle over a Health Department’s second job at a nonprofit that her department funds.

Currently, each department has their own standards for their own contractors, which is glaringly inefficient and leaves room enough for potential malfeasance and corruption. An August report from the city’s Controller’s Office recommended streamlining contracts with the same nonprofit across city departments to make it easier to track performance. We look forward to keeping track of how Supervisor Stefani plans to turn this information into action.

Aging SFUSD Facilities Keep District Stuck in Constant Cycle of Borrowing

A new assessment published by the district this week shows that San Francisco Unified School District’s 108 school sites need a whopping $1.4 billion in upgrade work done through 2027. While the report found that the school sites are safe, most had aging heating, ventilation, and plumbing systems that received “poor” or “deficient” ratings. The money to make these improvements will likely come from what’s called a “bond measure,” or when the district issues bonds, incurs the additional debt from the bonds, then spends the revenue from those bonds on repairs. 

SFUSD schools are locked in a constant cycle wherein facilities need repairs, SFUSD issues bonds to fund the repairs but then lags on execution, which then creates a backlog of repairs that requires issuing more bonds. Between 2003 and 2016, there were four separate bond measures passed for SFUSD schools that covered upgrades like replacing aging portables with new buildings, making seismic upgrades, modernizing classroom interiors and bathrooms, fire safety support, and elementary school greening programs. 

The bond measure from 2003 was to solve problems that sound awfully similar to what’s going on now—it was passed by voters to repair and replace heating, electrical, and plumbing systems, among other things. So why are we back here? Over time, the money from these bonds is spent on the intended purposes—but problems like these nevertheless persist as school facilities get older, and again create backlogs. 

Reforming how the state taxes commercial and industrial properties would likely solve this issue—and California voters were very close to approving this change in 2020. Unfortunately, it didn’t pass, so in order to break the cycle we’ll have to look out for future, similar measures. Because the Board of Education sets the spending plans for bond revenues, demanding more stringent oversight and planning for those plans is our best bet for holding elected leaders accountable for solving this issue.