NOVEMBER 2024 VOTER GUIDE
DISTRICT 1 SUPERVISOR
What is the Board of Supervisors?
An 11-member body that governs the affairs of the city
Each supervisor represents the roughly 80,000 residents who live in their district
Supervisors hold a significant amount of power to create or block policies and programs that impact the City
Supervisors can serve two consecutive terms of four years, and serve staggered terms so that every two years, either the even or odd districts are up for elections (this year, the odd districts are up for election)
The salary and benefits of this full-time position total $140,000 per year
Why You Should Care
Your supervisor represents you at the local level, and has the power to fix many of your day-to-day quality of life issues in your neighborhood. They are also powerful enough to solve citywide problems, particularly through their control of the budget which they pass annually after a series of deliberations. While the budget can be effectively used as a tool to implement policy, it can also be spent wastefully on items that are either performative or unaccountable to the voters. Examples: $61,000-per-tent encampments for the homeless, or $250,000-per-unit public restrooms often repurposed as drug injection sites.
Our Vision for the Board of Supervisors
They work with the Mayor and City Departments on the nuts and bolts of making our city better, with measurable outcomes, instead of performative and overly bureaucratic policies.
How We’re Evaluating Candidates’ Records
😍 Perfect 😃 Great! 😐 Fine or not enough info 🤔 Questionable 😩 Quite bad
When making endorsements, we judge candidates based on their political experience, managerial experience, and dedication to our issue areas. We came to our endorsement decisions after conducting interviews with candidates, deeply researching their records, and collecting our community’s input.
Why we’re voting for her: Marjan Philhour is a practical, straightforward advocate for San Franciscans, and as someone who was born in the Richmond and raised her family there, she knows her district’s needs inside and out. She’s also an expert in local issues, having just been elected to the Democratic County Central Committee in the March primary election. Her campaign priorities (public safety, education, housing, and street conditions) line up well with San Franciscans’ top priorities. We support Marjan Philhour for supervisor because we need someone with the energy, ingenuity, and courage to tackle the issues facing District 1.
Political Experience 😃
An expert in San Francisco politics
Say this for Marjan Philhour: she’s committed to her district. Starting her political life as an aide for former Democratic congressman Tom Lantos, Philhour has run for the District 1 Supervisor seat twice before—losing by just 125 votes in 2020. This prior experience has made her a strong candidate, building a coalition of community leaders, small businesses, and everyday San Franciscans backing her campaign. She rode that wave of support to a seat on San Francisco’s local Democratic governing board in March, and should have the momentum to push her over the top in the November election.
Past Policy 😃
Thinking big while working locally
Philhour just won her first election to San Francisco’s DCCC in March, so there’s not much policy to review. But she’s already been working for Richmond residents for years, co-founding the Balboa Village Merchants Association, hosting public safety forums to enhance neighborhood safety, and helping neighbors resolve and clean up encampments with dangerous conditions. Philhour has also been remarkably consistent on what she views as District 1’s biggest challenges, and her prescriptions to solve them. To alleviate homelessness and the mental health crisis, she’s always supported increasing San Francisco’s shelter capacity and adding more behavioral health treatment beds (the city has had way too few of both for years). She’s consistently advocated for improving SFPD through reforms, not defunding the police. And she’s long called to reform San Francisco’s permitting system to make it easier for new small businesses to open.
Proposed Policy 😍
Fixing structural problems, not just symptoms
Philhour’s policy positions show off her knowledge of San Franciscans biggest priorities, and an understanding of how to fix the structural issues causing San Francisco’s biggest problems. She supports reforming the city charter to make San Francisco’s government more efficient and accountable, wants to remove the bureaucratic red tape that’s strangled housing production and made San Francisco one of the most expensive cities in the country. To get to a fully-staffed police department, Philhour not only wants to increase budget allocations to hire more officers and improve the department’s recruitment and retention strategies, but also supports restructuring the Police Commission, to eliminate the confusion that’s hamstrung SFPD for the past few years.
Don’t Forget
The San Francisco Bay Area is home to one of the largest populations of Filipino-Americans in the US, but SF proper has never had a Filipino-American representative at the county level—if elected, Marjan would be the first.
✅ Marjan Philhour
⛔ Connie Chan
Why you should leave her off your ballot: Connie Chan has served one term as District 1 Supervisor, and unfortunately, she hasn’t proven herself qualified to serve a second. After winning a squeaker of an election in 2020 over current challenger Marjan Philhour, Chan has just been out of touch with her constituents—even getting booed at one recent event. It’s a sign that residents are fed up with Chan’s inability to improve conditions in her district, and her loyalty to a specific voting bloc on the Board of Supervisors over her own constituents. We’re leaving Connie Chan off our ballot because her priorities don’t line up with the San Franciscans she represents.
Political Experience 😐
A typical politician
Connie Chan has been in politics since 2005, serving as a legislative aide to District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin, former District Attorney Kamala Harris, and former supervisor Sophie Maxwell. In that time, she’s been a typical politician—saying what’s politically expedient, not what she might actually believe. Remember, when protesters were calling for new approaches to policing following George Floyd’s death in 2020, Connie Chan stated San Francisco needed to “dismantle” the police department. She later walked that statement back after rising crime made her previous position untenable for voters. San Francisco is facing an $800 million budget deficit, a fiscal crisis in our schools, and an uncertain economic recovery. Our elected officials need to be willing to take unpopular positions when it’s necessary. Connie Chan hasn’t shown she’s willing to do that.
Past Policy 🤔
Out of touch with her constituent's priorities
Connie Chan has occasionally supported some common-sense measures during her term as supervisor, like the “First-Year Free” program that waives certain fees for new small businesses, or Supervisor Catherine Stefani’s non-profit monitoring ordinance. But too often, she’s done a poor job representing her district, allying herself with mentor Aaron Peskin and taking positions that are wildly at odds with her constituents. In the March 2024 primary alone, Chan supported Prop B (72.9 percent of District 1 voted no), opposed Prop E (53.7 percent of District 1 voted yes), and opposed Prop F (58.4 percent of District 1 voted yes). For better or worse, San Francisco elects supervisors by district to represent residents. District 1 deserves a supervisor who actually represents their interests, not their political allies.
Proposed Policy 😩
Half-baked policy meant to confuse voters
Besides being out of touch with the San Franciscans she represents, too often Connie Chan proposes misguided or misleading legislation. In the November 2022 general election, Chan authored Proposition E, or the “Affordable Housing Production Act,” a ballot measure that actually made it more difficult to build affordable housing in San Francisco. But Prop E did achieve its intended effect—confusing voters enough to vote down Prop D, a measure that would have made it easier to build more affordable housing. This has been Chan’s policy M.O. throughout her term: draft legislation that sounds good to voters, while disguising the true effects.
Don’t Forget
Connie Chan is committed to government oversight, no matter how superfluous. In October 2023, Chan passed a bill reviving the Graffiti Advisory Board, a commission that studies the issues and effects of graffiti in San Francisco, but doesn’t do anything to actually mitigate or reduce the amount of graffiti people have to deal with.
District 1 includes the Inner Richmond, Central Richmond, Outer Richmond, Lone Mountain, Golden Gate Park, Lincoln Park, Sea Cliff and University of San Francisco.
Paid for by TogetherSF Action (tsfaction.org). Not authorized by any candidate or committee controlled by a candidate. Financial disclosures are available at sfethics.org.