Why Can't Anything Get Done?
“Have you ever walked through San Francisco, spotted a very normal problem and thought, “Why can’t someone just get that fixed?” Have you ever walked by again, eight months later, and it’s still there? Of course you have. We all have.”
It doesn’t matter what it is—it can be a pothole, a tent encampment, a bus that never runs on time, a garbage can that always overflows, or an empty lot that never seems to turn into the promised housing—it just persists, seemingly forever, as a monument to our government’s inability to take action.
Have you ever walked by again, probably another eight months later, and thought “What in God's name is anyone doing around here? Isn’t this somebody’s job?”
In fact, dear reader, it is somebody’s job. It’s the mayor’s job—here it is, right in the city’s charter.
“The Mayor shall be the chief executive officer and the official representative of the City and County, and shall serve full time in that capacity. The Mayor shall devote his or her entire time and attention to the duties of the office, and shall not devote time or attention to any other occupation or business activity. The Mayor shall enforce all laws relating to the City and County, and accept service of process on its behalf.
The Mayor shall have responsibility for [the] general administration and oversight of all departments and governmental units in the executive branch of the City and County.”
So there you have it. The mayor is in charge of San Francisco’s government, so now you know who to blame, right? Oh, if only it were that easy. In fact, there’s another, lesser-known part of our government making really important decisions in San Francisco: our commission system.
What Are Commissions?
Basically, commissions are oversight boards, meant to keep the government accountable. They’re supposed to provide guidance for certain city issues and be a watchdog for specific city departments. In theory, commissions exist to make sure city employees aren’t embezzling taxpayer money, or the police department isn’t going rogue, or the head of the public works department isn’t giving a bunch of city contracts to an unqualified cousin.
You might be noticing a problem already. If you’ve seen the news recently, you know we keep uncovering corruption scandals. So what’s going on? Why aren’t commissions doing their jobs?
San Francisco currently has 130 different commissions, citizen advisory committees and community boards, with seats for over 1,200 people. Each with different roles, responsibilities and levels of authority. With so many cooks in the kitchen, accountability for actual elected officials is incredibly diffuse. Ideally, these commissioners would serve as 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 on departmental policy, budgets, and hiring (or firing!), sit with people we didn’t elect.
San Francisco loves its bureaucracy. But all this bureaucracy actually decreases the city’s ability to get things done. With a $14 billion budget to spend and 39,000 employees working for the city to boss around, you wouldn’t be wrong to think that our streets would be clean enough to eat off. But if you’ve taken a walk around the city lately, well… you’re probably not itching to whip up a meal on the sidewalk.
So What Went Wrong?
Back in the mid-90’s, San Francisco underwent a major charter reform. That new charter aimed to place executive responsibility directly under the authority of our city’s elected officials, particularly the Mayor and to reorganize the city government to make it more rational and efficient. After years of work to develop a modern constitution for San Francisco, the new charter finally became effective in July 1996.
Since then, the San Francisco Charter has been amended successfully 106 times. These amendments often chipped away power from the Office of the Mayor, and created new layers of bureaucracy. These amendments:
Creating powerful new commissions to manage and oversee city departments that were previously managed directly by the mayor;
Reducing the mayor’s ability to make appointments on new or existing commissions, requiring the Board of Supervisors approve Mayoral appointments, and;
Creating mandatory budget set-asides. “Mandatory set-asides,” as their name suggests, mean that the city must spend a certain minimum amount on a designated issue. That means that of the $6 billion in the general fund, only about $2–3 billion of that is truly available for our lawmakers to use to fund their priorities. The rest is restricted by state and federal requirements and voter-mandated set-aside spending.
Back in 1996, the mayor had direct control over many of the city’s departmental functions, or had the appointment authority for the majority of commissioners. Now the mayor has direct control of less than half.
It gets worse. The dilution of power doesn’t stop with our commission system. While the mayor is elected citywide, the Board of Supervisors is elected in eleven different district elections. That means that the majority of the Board (and therefore a majority of commission seats) can be elected by just over 50 percent of votes in half the districts. This means that just over 25 percent of voters can have a majoritarian influence over government operations.
It’s like the electoral college on steroids (or frankly the U.S. Senate). Imagine if we let North Dakota and Vermont have veto power over every decision made by the president. In a system this parochial, where so many insular individuals have veto power, it’s nearly impossible to initiate policy that disrupts their interests.
Endless Appeals Fuel the Sourest of Grapes
Why does it take more time to approve housing in San Francisco than any other county in California?
Why has it taken literal years to decide if city will allow restaurants to engage in outdoor dining?
Why can’t San Francisco enforce any standards of behavior on public streets? Why are our ballots always so long?
And why are we voting on things like “Where the city can use artificial turf,” or “Should JFK Drive have vehicular traffic, or not?”
It’s because San Francisco never misses a chance to relitigate a settled issue. If the mayor makes a decision, it can be blocked by a commission (sometimes more than one), the Board of Supervisors, the courts, and ultimately the voters.
Without total unanimity behind every action, almost any public decision is subject to a nearly endless appeals process that gives power to a single individual to bring any activity to a halt. As a result, it takes years to get anything done and city staff spend more time swatting back appeals, than they do implementing good, serious policy decisions.
“Year after year, bewildered San Franciscans cry out for a hero to swoop in and save us, but maybe we don’t need a hero, maybe we just need to stop giving so much power to our villains.”
The Price of Populism
Divesting power away from a central authority down to “the people” is called populism, and it sounds really nice. Who doesn’t want to expand democracy? In reality we all pay dearly to live in this chaotic and sclerotic system because we haven’t actually expanded democracy, we’ve just made everyone less able to accomplish anything.
Thanks to nearly 30 years of poorly implemented populist ideas:
Any change in San Francisco is very difficult to accomplish and very easy to derail. The status quo is the beneficiary of inertia.
Everything takes longer.
Everything costs more. San Francisco is a city where a single public bathroom costs $1.7 million, and garbage cans cost $20,000 each!
Because we live in a world where time and money are limited, less can get done. Leaders have to choose their priorities very carefully and dedicate all their energy to those few causes. Despite the gargantuan size of the city government, all of those resources are eaten up by a legally-mandated, but relentlessly inefficient process.
Incentivizes corruption. Diffuse authority, unelected officials and endless discretion are incredible incubators of corruption, and San Francisco has it in spades.
Under this system, cajoling, compromise, and corruption supersede good governance and has allowed the very worst actors to maintain a toe hold in our city’s government operations, exacerbated our city’s most pressing issues, and had a devastating impact on civic life.
How We Can Fix It
At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, the current system clearly isn’t working. How do we get out of this mess?” Great question, and one we’ve been working on. TogetherSF Action is sponsoring a ballot measure that narrowly targets the problems described above.
Our measure sets a hard cap of 65 commissions in San Francisco, bringing our number of commissions much closer to similar cities around the country. This reform sets up a process to evaluate and streamline all of the commissions in San Francisco, combining the ones that share the same duties. Best of all, it keeps elected officials accountable by making it clear who’s responsible for fixing the city’s biggest problems.
San Francisco’s duplicative, unnecessary commissions have made it almost impossible to fix big problems in the city, but our measure will make San Francisco much more efficient to govern. Right now, we’re building a citywide campaign to collect signatures to make sure this measure qualify for the November ballot. Want to help? Sign up below.