Here’s what Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie promised on the campaign trail

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During Daniel Lurie’s successful 13-month marathon of a campaign, accountability became the byword. 

It was the word printed front and center and taped to the wall of Lurie’s first campaign headquarters in the Mission, and came up repeatedly on the campaign trail — 18 times when he spoke to voters at the Noe Valley Tavern in June. It hung behind him on a poster board as he made his election-night speech, and remained the core message when he declared victory two days later. He said his administration would be about three things: “Accountability, service, and change.” 

Lurie’s measure of mayoral success is Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor from 2002 to 2013. Lurie says he wants to revive San Francisco like Bloomberg rebuilt Manhattan after 9/11. To convince voters he can do the same, Lurie made a lot of promises on the campaign trail. 

Now, as he prepares to take office on Jan. 8, we asked some City Hall longtimers: What promises should Lurie be held accountable for fulfilling?

“Ninety-seven percent of what they [the mayoral candidates] said they want to do is probably the same thing,” said Ed Harrington, the city’s former controller and Public Utilities Commission general manager. “The root of the question is, can you do it?”

Two of the promises Lurie made on the campaign trail are doable and used to be the norm, said Harrington.  

• Lurie promised to sit down with all existing major department heads during his transition. Lurie said he will inform them that “an unprecedented level of change and accountability” is coming, and that they will have to “basically interview for their jobs,” as we reported on June 20. 

• At 8:30 a.m. every Monday, Lurie plans to gather all major department heads to report on their work for the week and their goals for the next six and 12 months. Their reports will need to be detailed, including specific issues, like the latest development on the Valencia Street bike lane, we reported on June 20. 

Harrington said there used to be frequent meetings between the mayor, the Board of Supervisors, and the major department heads to go over the priorities and important city issues. That became a lot less frequent, however, when Willie Brown became mayor. 

Every Monday morning with everyone? That might be a bit much. “But on a regular basis, absolutely,” Harrington said. “That’s how Dianne Feinstein ran the city, and how the city should’ve been run for the last 20 years”

Harrington called Lurie’s meeting plan “a breath of fresh air.”  

Art Agnos, the mayor from 1988 to 1992, who endorsed Aaron Peskin for mayor, agreed. He called Lurie’s meeting ideas “excellent!”

“It’s what I used to do, and I learned that from Feinstein.” Agnos, who succeeded Feinstein in 1988, recalled the 8:30 a.m. meetings where department heads presented reports and exchanged ideas between departments.

“I did it, and it was very useful,” Agnos said. “Not only for me, but also for the department heads — seeing whatever the issues were at the moment.” 

Lurie also said he would hold nonprofits accountable: 

• He plans to establish a unit of experts at City Hall to work with departments to write contracts for the city’s many nonprofit partners, centralizing their management and oversight, as Lurie wrote in his City Hall accountability plan.

Harrington, for his part, raised some concerns about that plan. 

“How centralized can you make it without delaying things? In a way that you can make a decision relatively quickly and pay them [the contractors] on time?” Harrington asked, referring to the unit of experts overseeing contracts.

At major city departments, such as the Department of Public Health, there are already teams with as many as 20 staffers working on billions of dollars’ worth of contracts, Harrington pointed out “If every contract in the city had to go to one place,” Harrington said, “that could really slow things down.”

Agnos agreed. “On paper,” he said, Lurie’s ideas “all make sense.” But the impact will come during implementation. “The city has a lot of challenges.”

“Devil’s in the details,” Harrington added.  

Lurie made several promises on the campaign trail. Here are some of the others: 

• Declare a fentanyl state of emergency on Day One.

• Fully staff the police department, the sheriff’s department, and the 911 dispatch office.

• Recruit officers that look like the communities they serve, and speak the language of the communities they serve.

• Have trained clinicians going out and dealing with people on the street with addiction issues or suffering from mental health crises. Pull police officers back from responding to those in distress or tent encampments. Make sure that police officers are out walking the beat. 

• Recruit 425 officers in the first three years of his administration.

• Create a police district focused on a hospitality zone to cover Union Square, Yerba Buena Center and Moscone Center.  

• By the end of his term, San Franciscans will be able to walk with their kids through the streets side by side (not single file), especially in the Tenderloin, and not step over somebody who is overdosing. 

• KPIs (key performance indicators) will be embedded in every City Hall contract. Specifically, Lurie wants to develop a contractor scorecard to track and assess how well contracts over $1,000,000 are meeting goals, timelines, and budget expectations. 

• Hire a chief financial officer for nonprofit contractors who reports directly to the mayor.

• Require nonprofit representatives to register as lobbyists, so that the public knows who they’re meeting in City Hall.

• Create a permit “shot clock” that sets maximum review times for the Planning Department and the Department of Building Inspections, and have project review meetings for each project to set the requirements and timeline. Get the long wait of 33 months to get a permit to build housing down to 12 months. 

• Create a transparent and user-friendly online approvals tracker to track where permits and entitlements are in the process.

• Get downtown office vacancy rate down from 37 percent to 10 percent in eight years, which is two mayoral terms. 

• Build a climate innovation hub, combining artificial intelligence with the need to tackle the climate crisis with local research institutions, tech companies, and universities.

• Emulate Feinstein and walk the streets and call up department heads out and say, “this job is not done.” 

After Lurie takes the oath of office, if something goes wrong in San Francisco, Lurie said, “that will be on me and my departments.” Lurie also said he is “not going to throw the previous mayor under the bus, not going to throw the DA under the bus or the police chief.” The mayor-elect promised: “I am going to hold myself accountable.”