What Makes a Good Mayor of San Francisco?

San Francisco is a challenging city for a mayor to manage. San Franciscans tend to agree on 90 percent of issues, but bicker publicly and loudly over the other 10 percent. Building coalitions in a city like this can trip up even the savviest politician. San Francisco also has a massive city government, with 39,000 employees and a $14.6 billion budget. With that giant bureaucracy comes a lot of complexity, and complexity in government is a breeding ground for corruption. If someone has to navigate five different city departments to make something happen, using graft or a little quid pro quo to grease the wheels suddenly becomes a more attractive option. 

San Francisco is also a launchpad for politicians with national ambitions. Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris, and Gavin Newsom all started their political careers in San Francisco, and plenty of state lawmakers got their start here as well. Politicians in this city are incentivized to shoot for national office, rather than taking on the mundane, but incredibly important day-to-day work of running a city. 

So what makes a good Mayor of San Francisco? It’s a combination of personal qualities, experience, and competencies—we’ve had good mayors that come from a number of different backgrounds. But overall, it boils down to one main thing: effectiveness. The mayor needs to exercise firm leadership over the city’s departments, they need to be an incisive manager, and they need to be a skilled politician who knows how to navigate City Hall with integrity.

“In order to fix San Franciscans’ biggest concerns and pull the city out of this economic downturn, we need a mayor who’s going to maximize opportunities to get sh*t done. ”

That’s important, because while the Mayor of San Francisco has a number of tools at their disposal (more on those in a moment), the mayor’s authority has also been constrained by amendments to the city charter over the last few decades. This limits the direction the mayor can give to city departments and even the people they can hire to lead those departments. So a good mayor needs to be an experienced manager and coalition-builder, who can work with the commissions that oversee city departments to get everyone on the same page. We’re working to pass a reform to the city’s charter that will make it easier for a Mayor of San Francisco to be effective, but we also need someone who’s undeniably good at the job.

The Mayor Should Be the City’s Ultimate Innovator, Visionary, and Authority

The mayor should define and execute an innovative vision of what the city can be. A good mayor should be the ultimate authority, making sure city departments and staff effectively carry out their vision for San Francisco and holding them accountable if they fail to meet expectations.

A good mayor will wield their authority and political savvy to make sure each city department can fix the problems they’re assigned to solve, whether it’s San Francisco’s persistently high rates of homelessness, rising crime, or a short-staffed police department. Most city departments are directly responsive to the mayor—they can be considered an extension of the mayor themselves, and a good mayor will keep departments accountable for creating a functional city.

For example, in 2011, San Francisco was still recovering from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The city had been forced to make budget cuts, and San Francisco’s path forward was unclear. But just 40 miles south, the tech sector was booming in Silicon Valley, and people were flocking to the region for jobs. 

Mayor Ed Lee decided that he wanted San Francisco to be the hub of the tech world, declaring he wanted them to start, stay, and grow here. This led to initiatives like the Twitter tax break, which helped one of the largest social media platforms expand while based in San Francisco. Mayor Lee’s vision, coupled with policy delivered effectively by city departments, kick-started San Francisco’s recovery and led to an almost decade-long period of growth in the city.

The Mayor Should Make City Hall Function as One Coherent Team

The Mayor of San Francisco coordinates all intergovernmental activities for the city and county—think of this part of the mayor’s job as a coach, directing their team to advance the mayor’s policy goals. So a good mayor should be an excellent manager, working with city departments, the commissions that oversee city departments, and the Board of Supervisors to implement their plan for San Francisco. 

“The mayor needs to set a vision for the city, with strict performance metrics for each department to ensure department heads actually deliver.”

Accomplishing anything in San Francisco is rarely as simple as moving from point A to point B—there are a huge number of political and bureaucratic hurdles in the way for the mayor. Navigating these hurdles successfully is the sign of a focused and effective mayor.

For example, Mayor London Breed led San Francisco through the COVID-19 pandemic with notably low death rates, making it one of the most successful responses to the pandemic by a city in the United States. Using emergency powers granted during the pandemic, Mayor Breed quickly enacted a stay-at-home order, mobilized city employees as emergency responders, enforced masking in public spaces, and rolled out lots of free testing sites across the city. As a result, San Francisco had one-third the death rate of Los Angeles County, about one-fourth of New York City’s, and researchers at the Department of Public Health, UCSF, and UC Berkeley found that San Francisco’s excess mortality rate was half the state’s total.

This was a massive, long-running operation, involving buy-in and coordination from multiple city departments and public health officials. It’s a good example of a mayor effectively managing a large, continuous operation with many moving pieces to effectively respond to a completely new challenge.

The Mayor Should Present a Balanced Budget

One of the mayor’s main duties is presenting their budget and policy priorities to the Board of Supervisors—this is how San Francisco spends our tax dollars, so it’s a pretty important part of the job. A good mayor will carefully balance the services that people rely on with the fiscal health of the city, while planning for the future. 

The mayor needs to ensure that our budget always puts San Francisco in a position to provide essential city services at a high level, without pushing the city into future deficits. The city budget shouldn’t excessively deplete “rainy day” funds to balance a budget unless absolutely necessary. While it might be tempting to use that money during economic downturns, depleting those funds creates future deficits which would endanger city services.

Further complicating this delicate balancing act is the role that powerful public sector unions play in San Francisco. A good mayor is able to compromise to ensure that workers receive the pay they deserve, while still being mindful of the costs associated with rising salaries and benefits. San Francisco is an expensive place to live and the city needs to be able to hire qualified people—being able to navigate this balance is essential in tight fiscal years, where conditions might not allow for significant raises but unions demand them anyway. 

For example, in 2005 Mayor Gavin Newsom started tracking and accounting for the city’s costs with a central database for the first time in San Francisco’s history, resulting in massive savings in a time of serious deficit. Ultimately, six redundant city departments were consolidated, 1,500 positions were eliminated, the city’s vehicle fleet was reduced by 21 percent, and cell phone use was curtailed by one-third, saving taxpayers upwards of $78 million dollars. Good mayors make these kinds of forward thinking, difficult decisions to ensure San Francisco doesn’t mortgage future stability for short-term gain.

The Mayor Should Create Policy That Delivers Results

The last major component of the mayor’s job is engaging in formal policy discussions with the Board of Supervisors—a good mayor effectively advocates for their policies and convinces the board to implement those policies. In a perfect world, the Board of Supervisors would serve as a healthy check on the mayor’s power, but in a city as fractious as San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors usually takes a much more adversarial approach.

So the mayor and board are probably going to butt heads during a mayor’s tenure. At the very least, a good mayor should work cordially and professionally with a majority of the Board of Supervisors to create legislation that meaningfully compromises vision with reality—without personal attacks or vitriol poisoning the efforts. 

For example, in 2001 the Board of Supervisors passed legislation by Mayor Willie Brown that required city contractors and leaseholders to provide health coverage to their workers. San Francisco was the first city in the country to require this coverage, and the policy was considered groundbreaking at the time. Mayor Brown made insuring all San Franciscans a top priority for his administration—by developing policy that supervisors on all sides could support, he was able to advance key goals.

“San Francisco needs a mayor who’s both a skilled manager and a skilled politician. ”

No matter their background, we need a mayor who can inspire the city to come together around their policies and work together to implement their vision for San Francisco. San Francisco needs a mayor who won’t get caught in the red tape of City Hall, with a backbone to stick to their guns and advance policies that fix San Francisco’s problems. That’s what TogetherSF Action is going to be looking for as we consider who to endorse in November.