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.

So what makes a good Mayor of San Francisco? 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 skilled manager, and they need to be a savvy 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.

It can be hard to stay on top of everything that happens in San Francisco politics—City Hall Digest navigates all the latest developments to make sure you’re in-the-know. Incredibly, but unsurprisingly, yet another scandal has popped up in the tangled web of nonprofit contractors that the city relies on to provide critical city services. This week’s City Hall Digest breaks down the reasons why unscrupulous people continuously take advantage of San Francisco’s system, the city’s failure to reduce traffic deaths despite adopting Vision Zero policies, and Aaron Peskin (again) creating legislation to specifically benefit a small group of his constituents at the expense of every other San Franciscan. Check it out.

It can be hard to stay on top of everything that happens in San Francisco politics—City Hall Digest navigates all the latest developments to make sure you’re in-the-know. This week’s City Hall Digest breaks down the latest lawsuit trying to force city officials to take some kind of meaningful action to fix the Tenderloin’s long-standing problems, weighs the risk-reward math behind some new ebike battery regulations, and examines Supervisor Catherine Stefani’s new legislation that (finally) requires the city’s nonprofit contractors to use standardized performance metrics.

It can be hard to stay on top of everything that happens in San Francisco politics—City Hall Digest navigates all the latest developments to make sure you’re in-the-know. This week’s City Hall Digest breaks down the cost of SFUSD reintroducing algebra to San Francisco 8th Graders, digs into what a new Chamber of Commerce poll says about the state of San Francisco (hint: it’s not great), and celebrates a rare win—San Francisco’s Mayor and Board of Supervisors working together to add more treatment beds in San Francisco.

A lot of things in San Francisco are pretty messed up—it can get overwhelming. Why can’t anything get done in San Francisco? A lot of our problems are glaringly obvious, why aren’t they getting fixed?

A big reason? The structure of San Francisco’s government. We have a strong Mayor system that doesn’t give the Mayor any authority, a system that puts real decision making power in the hands of unelected commissioners, a system that lets a single individual derail projects that have widespread support. It all adds up to a system that incentivizes inertia and keeps the status quo.

A lawsuit could potentially force San Francisco’s school board to radically change the way it elects school board members just months before the next election. In this guest editorial, John Trasviña lays out why this baseless change will have terrible consequences for SFUSD and San Francisco’s public schools, and what you can do to stop it.