City Hall Digest: Government Oversight Isn’t a Game
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.
Surprise DJ Set Rocks Downtown
Last week, San Francisco pulled off something nearly impossible—city officials kept a massive outdoor set by two world-famous DJs secret until nearly the last minute, surprising San Franciscans just a week before with news about the show. Better yet, the Skrillex and Fred Again show last Saturday went off flawlessly, showcasing Civic Center Plaza and downtown San Francisco for 25,000 fans.
The show is the first in a series of concerts from Bay Area concert promoter Another Planet Entertainment (APE). They’re part of a 2023 agreement between APE and city officials to bring musical acts to Civic Center, Embarcadero, and Union Square for three years, in exchange for concerts at Golden Gate Park Polo Fields. If the first show is any indication, San Franciscans have a lot to look forward to in the next few years.
Shows like this are a vital part of San Francisco’s economic recovery. They bring visitors to the city and boost civic pride. Downtown San Francisco has taken some hits lately, and the Tenderloin and SoMa have been ravaged by the effects of the fentanyl crisis, homelessness crisis, and mental health crisis. This show gave some much-needed stimulus to the area, and was a truly impressive logistical feat to boot. Pulling off an outdoor show for tens of thousands of people takes planning, coordination, and determination—traits that aren’t always hallmarks of San Francisco’s government.
But the show’s success highlights San Francisco’s resiliency. The city is like a Victorian fixer-upper right now—a little worn around the edges, but with great bones. Events like this restore some of San Francisco’s shine.
Of course, this is still San Francisco, the city that likes to go to bed early. The show ended mid-song, right at 10pm. People at the show didn’t seem upset though—they’d just been rocked for over three hours.
Supervisors are Trying to Use Commissions to Score Political Points
UPDATE: Tuesday, June 11, the Board of Supervisors voted 7-3 to renominate Debra Walker to her position on the Police Commission, rejecting Supervisors’ Ahsha Safaí and Walton’s politically-motivated recommendation.
Last week, the Board of Supervisors’ Rule Committee met to consider the nominations of two candidates for the Police Commission, the committee overseeing San Francisco’s police department. You might expect this to be a routine hearing—one candidate, retired Alameda County Judge C. Don Clay, is widely considered to be highly qualified; the other candidate, Debra Walker, is currently on the Police Commission, serving since 2022.
Things didn’t go as planned. In a baffling move, Supervisors Ahsha Safaí and Shamann Walton voted for Judge C. Don Clay’s nomination, but voted against Debra Walker’s renomination to the Police Commission. Well, baffling isn’t exactly the right word, but English doesn’t have a single word yet for “unexpected, but unsurprising given the political games in San Francisco politics”
Both Supervisors’ Safaí and Walton supported Walker’s nomination to the Police Commission in 2022. So why the sudden change of heart just two years later? To understand that, you need to know the context surrounding Walker’s nomination.
San Francisco has 130 commissions that provide government oversight for San Francisco’s city departments, with around 1,200 commissioners on those committees. Those commissioners are appointed by elected officials, and seats are often used as political favors or bargaining chips. Debra Walker was nominated to the Police Commission by Mayor London Breed, and she’s served without incident for the last two years.
But now Supervisor Ahsha Safaí is running for mayor against London Breed. He saw an opportunity to grandstand and try to make one of Breed’s nominees look bad to score some political points, and he took it.
A supervisor rejecting a qualified candidate over a political rivalry is bad enough, but the Police Commission is already short a few members, and was forced to cancel five meetings in row recently because they didn’t have enough members for a quorum. Supervisor Safaí’s political games aren’t just affecting a single nominee or the mayor, they’re affecting one of the most powerful government oversight committees in San Francisco.
The entire mess really highlights the absolute necessity of the commission reform measure we’re sponsoring for the next election. Commissioners shouldn’t be used as political pawns by people with ambitions for higher office, and with our reforms in place, they won’t be.
Consistent Enforcement Key to Curbing Illegal Street Vending
Last Monday, State Senator Scott Wiener and Mayor London Breed announced new legislation that would give San Francisco police the ability to ticket street vendors suspected of selling stolen goods. It won’t affect food vendors, only people who aren’t able to produce a receipt for the goods they’re selling. And to emphasize, this would just be a ticket, like a parking ticket or speeding ticket. But it’s more enforcement for San Francisco’s stolen goods markets than the city has seen in a long time.
Illegal street vending has exploded in San Francisco in the past few years, and city officials have had a hard time containing it. It’s a more difficult problem to solve than you might expect. A full ban on any street vending would put an end to the street dog carts that pop up around nightlife, along with the fresh fruit and juice sellers that make walking around the Mission so satisfying. No one wants that—but for a long time, elected officials took a completely hands-off approach to enforcement. Consequently, blankets full of stolen goods started lining Market Street and Mission Street, sometimes blocking the entire sidewalk.
The city’s laissez-faire attitude towards illegal street vending created a vicious cycle: shoplifters had a reliable place to sell stolen goods, so retail theft got bigger and more organized. That led to more stolen goods for street markets, which led to more street vendors setting up shop on the sidewalk, which gave more incentive to shoplifters, and so on.
Last November, District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen announced a temporary, 90-day moratorium on street vending on Mission Street to try to curb the problem. That ban had mixed results due to spotty and inconsistent enforcement, but was still extended another six months this February.
While Supervisor Ronen’s full street vending ban didn’t work especially well, we have another recent example that’s more encouraging. From November 2023 to January 2024, Public Works ramped up street cleaning efforts and illegal street vending enforcement around the 16th and 24th Street BART plazas and surrounding areas. During the three months of the operation, data from SFPD and Public Works showed a 22 percent decrease in assaults, a 46 percent decrease in robberies, and a 23 percent decrease in 311 service requests for street cleaning in the neighborhood.
Those are significant numbers, but why did one approach work while the other failed? Consistent enforcement. People respond to consistency—take speeding for example. If someone knows they might get a ticket if a police officer catches them speeding, they’ll likely continue speeding, paying tickets on the rare occasions they get them. But if there’s a speed camera on a street, ticketing everyone who drives over the speed limit, people slow down much more often.
Senator Wiener and Mayor Breed’s new legislation has a good chance to curb illegal street vending if it’s enforced consistently. Consistent enforcement should have a multiplier effect, reducing assaults, robberies, and other bad behavior that follows stolen good markets. In time, it could reduce retail theft in San Francisco too, as shoplifters have fewer places to fence stolen goods. But this virtuous cycle will only happen will consistent enforcement.
Proposed Budget Balanced by Cuts and Clever Accounting
Mayor London Breed just released her proposed budget for the year, and despite facing a $799 million budget deficit over the next two years, Mayor Breed proposed a $1.3 billion increase in the budget next year. That might seem like fiscal mismanagement, but it’s really a case of some savvy cuts, combined with growth in department funding that the mayor can’t touch. Let’s dive in.
While the $1.3 billion dollar budget increase got all the headlines, the budget’s growth is primarily driven by the city’s enterprise departments. City departments like the Port of San Francisco, the Public Utilities Commission, and SFMTA are enterprise departments—they determine their own budgets. While those budgets are approved by the Mayor and Board of Supervisors, that money can’t go to anything except those departments (this amounted to about $7.8 billion last year). Enterprise departments earn their own revenues, often by charging for services—i.e. SFMTA charges for bus and train rides, and those revenues flow back into their departments. Since those department’s revenues are separate from the city, next year’s budget growth isn’t due to the mayor simply saying, “let’s spend nine percent more this year than last year.”
So that’s where a good portion of the budget increase came from. But by California law, San Francisco has to have a balanced budget—expenses need to match revenues. And revenues are down year over year. So how did Mayor Breed achieve this balancing act? Through clever accounting techniques, and budget cuts, which while necessary, will likely be pretty unpopular.
Mayor Breed’s team was able to avoid shrinking the general fund (the city’s main source of discretionary spending in the budget) through a combination of cuts, reduced hiring, and about $122 million in rainy day reserves. The city still has about $850 million remaining in reserves, so San Francisco is not in grave danger of running out of money, but this is still a slightly risky move, as reserve funds should be saved for catastrophes like a natural disaster.
About $470 million of the two-year deficit would be solved with accounting measures, using state or federal sources to fund city departments instead of local funding. For example, the Department of Public Health is getting around $100 million in a one-time health care reimbursement from the federal government.
Mayor Breed wants to close the remaining $300 million deficit through spending reductions—AKA budget cuts. The proposed budget includes cuts to nonprofit contracts that don’t relate to direct services like housing, shelter and food security, instead focusing on cutting contracts for services like community outreach programs, workforce development, and community events.
This budget is a meaningful step in the right direction—Mayor Breed was able to balance mandatory growth for enterprise departments with cuts for non-essential services. Still, the best way out of a deficit is through economic growth. San Francisco needs to get back to the “boom” part of our regular boom-bust cycle soon to avoid any further long-term economic damage.
Got more questions about the budget? Our recent budget explainer has got you covered.