In the days leading up to today’s inaugural celebrations for Mayor Daniel Lurie, City Hall and Civic Center Plaza were festooned with blue and gold banners depicting sun-like beams. Frankly, it looks a little bit like the Kazakh flag, but we’re relatively certain this isn’t the impression Team Lurie was going for.
Rather, these banners are subtle, but the underlying message isn’t: A new day, a rising sun; it’s morning again in San Francisco. Cliched, even a bit cheesy, but here’s the thing: It’s true. Add to whatever other myriad privileges Lurie has enjoyed in his life, the privilege of following London Breed in this job.
San Francisco’s new mayor has never held conventional employment; when Lurie raises his right hand and takes his oath of office today, he’ll be sworn into the most conventional job he has yet held, and he doesn’t even plan to keep the money. We are left searching for indicators in his personal and professional history to hint at where he intends to take San Francisco, let alone how he would manage to take us there.
No matter: Government official after government official welcomed this transition; one veteran City Hall denizen compared Lurie’s entrance and Breed’s exit to “a monsoon sweeping across the Gangetic Plain after months of 45-degree Celsius weather.”
For the American audience, 45 degrees Celsius is 113 degrees Fahrenheit. This is stifling and unbearable — and, long before November, so was the outgoing mayor. Breed’s governmental master plan all too often appropriated the vaunted strategies of SODDI (“Some Other Dude Did It”) and BEE (“Blame Everyone Else”) deployed by any number of defense attorneys who place ads in bus shelters.
Breed, farcically, called for large-scale governmental reform a mere six-and-a-half years into her mayoral term, and openly pined for the days when she had emergency powers, and checks and balances didn’t apply to her. Her reelection pitch turned out to be I cannot fix the problems, and voters concurred. Enter Lurie.
To borrow the line from Richard Nixon, San Francisco won’t have London Nicole Breed to kick around anymore. On the other hand: There’s never been a better time to kick. Unlike Willie Brown, Breed did not seed the government with her foot soldiers, so as to ease into a decades-long career as an influence peddler. Any disgruntled person with a story to tell — who held their tongue because the mayor of San Francisco is clothed in immense power — can now line up and do their best imitation of Ray Wersching.
Actually, forget Ray Wersching. We may yet see a veritable kick line of disgruntled Rockettes. Every kick will extend Lurie’s mayoral honeymoon.
Breed, on the last full day of her tenure, sent out a press release noting that crime in San Francisco had fallen to 20-year lows, with precipitous drops in homicides and car break-ins. That didn’t do her much good with the voters, but it’s not a bad place for Lurie to start out: Crime is, statistically, on the wane. And, with a new mayor in office, voters may — elusively and magically — feel safer too.
So, the monsoon analogy isn’t a bad one. Rather than high-decibel hectoring and blame-deflection and calls for municipal autocracy, our new mayor’s C.V., for what it’s worth, indicates an overriding desire to get people into a room and act as a facilitator. But banners depicting a driving rainstorm would probably be ill-received. It’s morning again in San Francisco was likely the better choice.
Does Daniel Lurie need to radically change San Francisco to succeed? Or does he just need to do the basics — things like cleaning the streets and imparting a feeling of security that every denizen of every city would want, especially those paying ludicrous amounts of money for the privilege of residing in this one?
The answer, of course, is yes. In San Francisco, it will require radical change to do the basics.
While our aspirational overlords who poured millions into the most recent election cycle bemoaned our mayor’s inability to summarily hire and fire department heads, San Francisco has far more pressing issues regarding would-be department heads not wanting to work for us in the first place — and an inability to hire anyone. Whether it’s cops or sheriff’s deputies or nurses or social workers or teachers, San Francisco’s onerous hiring processes and sclerotic bureaucracy drive away qualified candidates or draw out the process interminably enough that other municipalities can swoop in and poach them.
Civil service reform: It ain’t sexy. It ain’t a campaign promise sort of thing. But think of it — and so many other devils in San Francisco’s ocean of details — like the nuts and bolts holding together a car. Nobody talks up the integrity of the nuts and bolts as a selling point. Nobody gives them a moment’s notice (except when you, incongruously, find a bolt sitting on the floorboard of a brand-new vehicle). But if they’re faulty, the car comes to grief.
Lurie, a government naif, has surrounded himself with more experienced people. None of them, through temperament or practice, appear to be the sort to propose revolutionary new ideas.
“But we don’t need more new ideas,” counters another longtime government official. “We need someone who is going to sit down and do the boring part of the job. Daniel Lurie is boring: He is going to be there and manage the already shit-ton of ideas; you need a manager willing to do the hard work and roll up his sleeves and regularly meet department heads — other than yelling at them — and pick up the phone and call the legislative branch.”
How that will work out remains to be seen. But how it was working out for the past six-plus years was a known commodity. Again and again regarding the outgoing administration, we wrote that you cannot legislate a solution to a problem that is fundamentally a management problem. It requires good management.
Truth be told, San Francisco has been poorly run for a long, long time. And that is due, in large part, to broken process issues. But it’s also due to talent and vision issues. The Lurie Administration can now take a crack at all of the above. It can make a play at that elusive good management.
Lurie’s most visible move prior to the inauguration was to rejigger the mayor’s office and bring in policy chiefs, a 21st-century spin on the old deputy mayor system.
On the one hand, this reduces the insane number of people reporting to the mayor. It could give the city’s chief executive, especially one with no prior experience in a similar role, greater ease in managing the city. It also provides high-level positions for experienced people with deep connections in local and regional governance.
On the other hand, it could introduce an extra layer of bureaucracy in a city already replete with it. It could neuter the role of chief of staff, create a cadre of plenipotentiaries fighting to adequately fund their areas of oversight and enable skilled fixers to play policy chiefs off against one another.
And, on the third hand, rolling out these appointments every day, like a bureaucratic advent calendar, might bring a bit too much attention to the new mayor and the intractable problems he aims to solve, which will not be remedied overnight.
But let’s, for the sake of optimism, say this setup makes things better. Let’s say it allows the mayor to more efficiently manage the city. It still won’t improve the city’s outlook; it’d be a bit like tinkering with the 311 system but not fixing the underlying problems being reported. But you’d be informed of them that much more efficiently.
What are the problems facing San Francisco? As Joan Rivers would put it, “Can we talk?” San Francisco’s downtown office core still too much resembles the quasi-abandoned streets that hosted the final showdown in “Yojimbo;” the Municipal Transportation Agency is running on fumes and all anyone seems to give a damn about is cable cars; the city is facing down a massive state-mandated rezoning effort and an even more massive budget deficit; and, for good measure, the public school system is still teetering on the brink.
Hiring cops, cops, cops has been proposed as the cure for all that ails San Francisco, but the most recent academy class started out with 40 officers and graduated just 12. They could all fit in that new Toyota van.
One veteran City Hall denizen compared Lurie’s entrance and Breed’s exit to “a monsoon sweeping across the Gangetic Plain after months of 45-degree Celsius weather.”
Oh, also, the nation will this month be handed to a lizard-brained kleptocrat, with every reason, political and personal, to wreak havoc on this city. In case you were wondering, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarded San Francisco $148 million during the pandemic, but $267 million in submitted claims has not yet been reimbursed. But, get this, it’s within FEMA’s authority to not only stiff the city for those promised payments but to claw back the money it has already awarded.
So, that’s $415 million, which the city has already spent, that could be yanked away on a whim. That’s a fair bit of money. Enough for the city to buy toilet paper into the 25th century, assuming there’ll still be a San Francisco. Or toilets.
That’s the sword of Damocles hovering over this city. If anything, there are dangling swords, plural, to deal with. Daniel Lurie is facing challenges no San Francisco mayor ever has. The question isn’t if he’s up to it but, rather, if anyone could be up to it. Lurie impressed voters as a nice and decent man. But, considering the state of the budget deficit, people will be hurt. Powerful constituencies will be angered. He will have to make difficult decisions of the sort he’s surely never made before.
But today? It’s a new day, a rising sun; it’s morning again in San Francisco. And after that? The deluge.
This article originally misstated the numbers for the most recent Police Academy Class. It graduated 12 officers out of an initial enrollment of 40, not 11 of 45.
“Daniel Lurie is boring: He is going to be there and manage the already shit-ton of ideas; you need a manager willing to do the hard work and roll up his sleeves and regularly meet department heads — other than yelling at them — and pick up the phone and call the legislative branch.”
I hope Lurie is the best SF mayor ever and fixes all our problems. I’ll keep an open mind. Unfortunately there is just no evidence a guy who has been handed everything in his life is able to do hard boring management work successfully.
In San Francisco, so as in the US. The Democrat governance model both locally and nationally has crumbled.
The national Democrat Party had ample opportunities to restructure politics the easy way, but despite repeated alarms (Jackson, Brown, Nader, Dean, Warren, Sanders), no matter how tepid, the Dems hit snooze, shifted repeatedly right, and served the donors.
SF’s progressive residue, confined to the shrinking circles of nonprofits and public sector unions, had ample chances to do structural reform the easy way. But they refused to initiate reforms and repressed any reforms organized by others, refusing to articulate a comprehensive progressive urban political agenda, shifted to the right, and served the donors.
Now with Trump and Lurie, structural change is going to happen the hard way, from the right. At this point, progressives will come out better in the end after the conservatives clean out the cruft that’s refused to do things the easy way which will remove impediments, the Democrat national and state parties and their local patronage network, so that those who come next will be able to take the fight to the right wing and not have to waste time punching through putative allies.
The only way to beat the oligarchs under Citizens United is for Citizens to Unite, our numbers beat their money. Serve the voters first and you can do whatever else you want.
I want to join the kick line! I laughed, scoffed and agreed with much of your analysis. I am a SF citizen, home owner, taxpayer, donor to Mission Local. My prayers are for our new Mayor’s success at taming the beasts of bad management and squandered assets that plague San Francisco. Mayor Lurie paid to play with his own money but now I hope there is no more PAY to PLAY for city contracts and positions. Also every non profit (501c3) that receives a contract or grant from the City and County SHOULD be required to have a current independent certified audit before any dollars are doled out to them. I hope the Mayor’s new organization chart is genius and succeeds in making San Francisco fiscally sound and the best city that it can be for homeowners, renters and those just passing through. Keep-’em honest Joe!
Progressives wanted Breed gone. As it happened, and more significantly, so did Tech money. So she went.
And now the new old left gets a mayor who is very probably more right-wing than Breed and no more to its liking. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. We don’t get fooled again.
But you know what they say. A change is as good as a rest.
“Mais où sont les Frank Jordans d’antan?”
everything old is new again… but with billionaires
Turn that frown upside down! Sam Altman’s on the transition team! We’re going to have an AI-assisted kakistocracy!
What a glorious time to be alive.
Glad we have a new mayor and new supervisor for district 5.
Both the city government and the issues need a real deep cleaning
Accountability , oversight and the slow pace and apathy by the last administration are needed
People need to work
Get the drug dens removed and homeless off the public passageways
Temp food clothing shelter and services
Law enforcement
Those who think they can come here hang out all day and expect others to foot the bill is ending
The selfishness of those on the street that has been tolerated needs to end
If you dont work then go find a job you may need to move It is not the cities responsibility to babysit and give you room service
Get off your butt Mature
Give Lurie and chance
Since when did we start calling bus stops, bus shelters? lol
The bus shelter is the structure that shields you from rain while waiting for the bus, usually containing seats, a map and list of routes that stop there, and sometimes a screen showing arrival estimates. While it would be great if all Muni stops had shelters, it’s not the case.
The terms are easily mixed up.……since the introduction of the actual first bus shelter in 1987 (Feinstein was mayor) in front of the War Memorial Opera House. Today we have both: bus stops and bus shelters. History lesson: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Evolution_of_the_San_Francisco_Bus_Shelter
The terms are easily mixed up.……since the introduction of the actual first bus shelter in 1987 (Feinstein was mayor) in front of the War Memorial Opera House. Today we have both: bus stops and bus shelters.