‘Retirement was not an option:’ Peskin sees himself as most experienced choice for SF mayor

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Board President and mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin thinks San Francisco is at a “crossroads.” It faces an $800 million budget deficit, a downtown business model that has gone extinct, and record levels of San Franciscans who feel their city is unsafe, dirty and no longer working for them.

And his opponents in the mayor’s race to lead the city, Peskin said Friday night in a conversation with Mission Local’s managing editor Joe Eskenazi, represent slight variations on a familiar theme: “What happened that the top candidates in this race were very similar, at very similar ideological perspectives?” he asked. 

“At a certain point, I decided that retirement was not an option. Going back to buying water rights for Indian tribes in Nevada was important, but was not as important as the future of the city that we live in.”

After Daniel Lurie, Ahsha Safaí and Mark Farrell, Peskin has been the fourth mayoral candidate to visit Manny’s at 16th and Valencia streets for a conversation with Eskenazi. More than 150 people — undecided voters, Peskin’s supporters, and some minor candidates running for mayor — packed the cafe, leaving little room to stand.

Throughout the one-hour interview, Peskin repeatedly returned to his two decades of experience at City Hall. He was District 3 supervisor from 2001 to 2009, and again from 2015 to the present. He has been elected board president three times, he reminded the crowd, and said that makes him a “citywide candidate.”

That time in office, he said, has given him a deep understanding of how city departments function in-and-out. “No other candidate for that office has had that level of experience.”

Also on Friday, Peskin revealed a new measure, to be announced Monday, that would expand the pool of businesses exempt from the city’s gross receipts tax. The proposal would increase, from $2 million to $5 million, the annual revenue needed to get an exemption from the tax.

Specifics of the measure were not immediately available, but the proposal would likely be on the November ballot. The measure will require a compromise between the city’s unions, who will worry about a hit to the city’s general fund, and its business community, eager for any tax breaks during an economic downcycle. 

The proposal, said Peskin, “is an instance of collaboration, it has been a remarkably complex project … and actually, earlier today, we put the last touches on this package.”

Collaboration, Peskin said, would be his bread and butter. It’s been more than 30 years since San Francisco had had a progressive mayor, but Peskin refused to let other, more moderate candidates claim public safety as their issue. In his perspective, public safety and fiscal prudence are progressive values, while the government’s role to care for the most vulnerable transcends political ideology.

“Being a mayor,” he said, “there are no moderate or progressive potholes. They’re just potholes. And our job is to fill them efficiently and get the job done and make the city the city that knows how to work again.”

That, he said, is something Mayor London Breed has left to others. Under him, he said, “the city won’t be run by the chief of staff. It will be run by the mayor,” he said, none-too-subtly stating that Breed leaves the day-to-day running of the city to her chief of staff, Sean Elsbernd.  

‘Who will you fire?’ ‘No comment.’

When asked at earlier Mission Local events which department heads they would let go if elected, District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safaí said he would replace health-department boss Dr. Grant Colfax, police chief Bill Scott and SFMTA director Jeffry Tumlin. Mark Farrell said he would dismiss Scott and Tumlin. 

Peskin, for his part, refused the exercise, and instead compared that style of management to “Donald Trump-like behavior.” He refused to even speculate about Phil Ginsberg, head of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department; the two have been on poor terms for a long while.

But Peskin said he sees no reason to speak badly of Ginsburg, and noted that city surveys consistently reveal high satisfaction with parks. “I think people feel very good about their parks,” he said. “And so, as a mayor, you have to acknowledge if things are working well.” 

Peskin, like other candidates, said that public safety is not just about crime statistics, but how people “feel” going out on the streets. “When I hear stories about people, seniors who don’t want to leave their residences — it doesn’t matter how safe the streets actually are, that is unacceptable,” he said. 

He advocated filling the 300 vacant positions in the San Francisco Police Department, as well as fixing the city’s civil-service hiring system, which keeps would-be city workers waiting for as long as 16 months before being hired. 

Peskin said he is also in favor of expanding the “real community policing” North Beach and Chinatown residents receive from officers at Central Station. Those officers, he said, are linguistically competent, grew up in the neighborhoods and know the names of residents and shopkeepers after years of patrolling. It’s policing he would like to see throughout the city. 

But he did not stump on crime as much as other candidates have, setting him apart from Breed, Farrell and Lurie, who have invariably made public safety the crux of their campaigns, with some even fanning a fear of crime themselves. 

“We have some very real challenges and some very real struggles around homelessness, around crime, around people feeling safe, around drug use,” he said. “But those are things that San Francisco is addressing and are solvable.”

Billionaires, NIMBYism, and a strong mayor system

Peskin in 2024 is clearly no longer the man he was a decade ago, who quashed talks of running for mayor because he wasn’t electable citywide. “I guess the city has changed, and I think we’re all aware,” he said.

“I’m used to lopsided elections. I’m used to being outspent 3-to-1 or 4-to-1. But that landscape has changed as a handful of extremely wealthy special interests have invested now untold sums into local elections.” He said he’s the only major candidate in this race who does not have a billionaire on his side.

He thanked “the good people” in District 3, who kept him their supervisor for 17 of the past 24 years, sparking applause from several corners of the room. “I guess, in those 24 years, I’ve become viable as a citywide candidate,” he said.

But Peskin’s most die-hard opponents, for their part, see his two-plus decades as a key reason for the city’s decline: The political pressure group TogetherSF put out a report last year with the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College, pushing forward the thesis that Peskin’s actions, in part, have eroded the power of the mayor. GrowSF, an allied group that frequently lambasts Peskin, has also pointed to Peskin’s “quest to sabotage the mayor’s office.”

That’s wrong on the facts, he said. In comparison to virtually any other major American city, “we don’t have a strong-mayor system of government, we have a super strong mayor system of government … and I intend to use it to actually get things done and bring people together.”

The question of how to revive downtown, he said, is real, but also an opportunity to rethink use of a city center that used to be filled with retail and tech workers. “San Francisco’s downtown — that’s where I met my wife in the 1980s — was never a place you hung out … it was not the 24-hour neighborhood,” he said. (Peskin’s wife, Nancy Shanahan, was in the audience.)

The real estate prices in downtown right now, however, allow the city to turn it into a “destination neighborhood,” he continued, whether it’s injecting housing into the downtown core or bringing arts or a string of neighborhood parks to the area. 

When asked whether San Francisco is in a housing crisis, Peskin responded, “We are in an affordable housing crisis.” His solutions? Eviction protections, and extending rent control to the 40 percent of renters who are not privy to it.

“Despite what my opponents would like you to believe, I have been pro-housing from the first day that I got into office,” he said. 

He referenced legislation for rezoning the eastern half of the city, which allowed for thousands of additional units. In the Mission, however, the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan has long been viewed as a precursor to widespread gentrification and displacement. . 

Peskin said he had voted for more than 100,000 units of housing, including at Rincon Hill, Parkmerced, central SoMa, western SoMa, Balboa Park, the Potrero Shipyard and Candlestick Point. He pointed to on-site inclusionary housing, and multiple affordable housing bonds. 

When asked how much housing he enabled, however, in “his backyard” — Peskin lives in Telegraph Hill of District 3 — he avoided giving specific figures.“The northeast corner of the city that happens to be District 3 is the densest part of this entire city,” he said. “So we have a lot less opportunity sites than there are in other parts of the city.”

Asked about Mohammed Nuru and San Francisco’s years-long corruption crisis, he lamented the fact that it took the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office to investigate. He mentioned his proposal for establishing an inspector general in City Hall as a way to fight corruption locally. 

Peskin was not specific about a ranked-choice strategy, which will become critical in six months’ time: If his more moderate opponents create one for themselves, it could rob him of a path to victory. 

But, he said, voters should fill out all 10 of their candidate choices come November.

“Use all your votes” in the ranked-choice election, he said. Otherwise, it “is really throwing away your vote.”