Special Report: Experts at Claremont McKenna Diagnose the Roots of SF’s Dysfunction

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.

At TogetherSF Action, we’re interested in getting to the root of San Francisco’s dysfunction to empower residents to push for solutions to the city’s biggest challenges. Whether it’s putting out a Voter Guide or mobilizing thousands of San Franciscans to demand an end to the drug crisis, everything we do is laser-focused on making sure things get better. This week (and just in time for back-to-school!), our sister organization TogetherSF hit the books, commissioning an independent report from the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College to diagnose exactly what’s so wrong with San Francisco’s government—and how it can get better. Independent and non-partisan, the Rose Institute is one of the leading research and good government institutes in the country. This week’s City Hall Digest will focus entirely on their report.

The report concludes that the city’s inability to effectively deliver on improved street conditions, public safety, homelessness, and economic recovery is actually a symptom of how San Francisco’s government is structured. Of course, we’re facing outside challenges such as an influx of a new deadly drug and the lasting impact of a global pandemic. But a truly effective local government will bend and not break when confronted with society’s greatest challenges, as long as the structures that lie within are set up for those using those systems to succeed.

The report’s authors analyzed San Francisco’s city charter (that’s basically our city’s constitution) and its amendments, compared San Francisco to other cities, and interviewed about 30 local officials, including current and former elected officials, appointed officials, and other civic leaders.

The diagnosis? San Francisco’s ailing in four major structural areas: how we elect our supervisors, how much power we give the Mayor, the high number of oversight commissions the city relies on, and over-reliance on ballot initiatives to solve major problems. The report analyzes the historical development of each of these systems, their strengths and weaknesses in comparison with other cities, and proposes solutions. 

The report is a true academic paper, and as such, it’s quite long. We’ve got the TL;DR here. This is still City Hall Digest, after all.

San Francisco Supervisors Hold Major Power, But Are Elected By a Small Subset of Voters

Currently, supervisor elections in San Francisco rely on a very small number of voters relative to the whole city to make decisions on who holds power—just about 25 percent of each of the 11 supervisorial district’s 80,000 registered voters actually vote for their supervisors. This creates an imbalance at the Board of Supervisors, wherein supervisors become beholden to these microfactions instead of putting the concerns of the city first. 

San Francisco used to have “at-large” supervisorial elections, in which representatives were elected by voters across the city instead of just their neighborhoods. However, the 100 percent at-large system tended to produce lopsided results that lacked diversity and true representation of the makeup of the city. Oakland and Charlotte have mixed systems, in which representatives are elected both at-large and by district. 

The Rose Institute report found that moving to a mixed system could combine local representation while ensuring citywide issues like public safety, homelessness and housing have citywide solutions. 

San Francisco Is Creating Policy at the Ballot Box Instead of Within City Hall

Anyone who’s voted in San Francisco in the past couple of years has seen firsthand that it’s far too easy for our elected officials to put confusing and highly complicated policy decisions before voters. A minority of the Board of Supervisors (just four!) can easily put a measure they like into consideration, resulting in bloated ballots. 

Likewise, the threshold for special interest groups to put measures before voters is far too low compared with other cities. Other cities like Los Angeles and San Jose require a signature-based, non-charter amendment initiative to have signatures equal to 10 percent of their registered voters before allowing it on the ballot. In San Francisco, the requirement is about equal to only 2 percent of registered voters. 

A major consequence of this dysfunction is that San Francisco voters are overwhelmed with numerous local ballot measures in most elections. From 2013-2022, 115 ballot measures were introduced here, versus 55 in San Diego, and just 35 in LA in that same period. In the November 2016 election, there were 25 local ballot measures for San Franciscans to vote on.

The Rose Institute found that making it just a little more difficult for supervisors and citizens to place initiatives on the ballot would address this problem, and bring the process more in line with comparable cities.

The Mayor Is the Ultimate Authority, But Lacks Authority

San Francisco has a “strong mayor” form of government, which means the Mayor is expected to act as the City’s chief executive officer, but the Mayor’s powers are constrained in various ways that extend beyond regular checks-and-balances. Generally speaking, the city’s charter gives the Mayor broad powers over things like dictating the budget and setting city policy but the report shows that, over time, Mayoral power has been chipped away at by amendments to the charter. Think of it like this: the foundation was laid for a strong building, but over time different builders had different ideas of what the final product should look like. The result is an unlivable structure. 

The two most egregious ways in which the Mayor is hamstrung? They can’t hire or fire department heads or commissioners, and have limited resources to staff their office. These restrictions hinder the Mayor from being able to lead the city and exert executive decisions at the highest levels. 

The Rose Institute found that increasing the Mayor’s ability to hire and fire commissioners and department heads, and expanding the Mayor’s resources to hire top-flight staff would help rebalance the mayoral power structure.

San Francisco Is Drowning In Oversight

San Francisco loves its bureaucracy—just look at its 130 commissions, citizen advisory committees and community boards. With over 1,200 people seated across these bodies, accountability for actual elected officials is entirely diffused. Commissions are boards that oversee city departments. Ideally, they’re impartial arbiters who provide oversight and ensure politicians are enacting solutions-oriented policies.

In practice, they work differently. We hold our elected leaders responsible for the state of the city, and yet massive decisions such as departmental policy, hiring and firing power, and also recommendations on departmental budgets all sit with people we didn’t elect. Instead of being elected to their seats, commissioners are appointed by the Mayor and Board of Supervisors. Those 1,200 seats take city staff time to fill, and because commission seats are a vaunted entryway to the city’s political circles, they are often used by elected officials to elevate their supporters. 

The Rose Institute found that, in addition to a comprehensive evaluation of what commissions could be reduced or combined, standardizing the rules for the selection and removal of commissioners would go a long way toward fixing the broken commission system and restoring accountability to the legislative and executive branches. 

This report is an important public resource, one that will help inform conversations about the ways we can improve our city government. Our hope is that our legislative body will be able to use this report to guide decisions about the future of San Francisco’s government. 

You can help make that happen. Share this report with your friends and family to help more people understand the issues facing San Francisco. If you’d like to see more work like this and help us level up our impact, please consider a donation to TogetherSF Action.