Mayor Lurie doesn’t want to work with new S.F. big-money group. But they want to work with him. 

Are you a regular Joe Eskenazi reader?

Mission Local is home to San Francisco’s premier political reporter, serving up analysis you can’t get elsewhere. If you agree, help feed the city’s news appetite — donate below.

Donate

In 1977, Karol Wojtyła was a Polish clergyman who drove a light blue Ford Escort. One year later he was Pope John Paul II. This would bring a windfall to a future owner of that ’75 Escort, but it was more problematic for Poland’s ruling communist regime. 

When he got the news, one apparatchik purportedly said, into an open microphone, “My God, my God, from now on, we’ll have to kiss his ass.” A smarter apparatchik, however, more accurately gauged the situation: “Only if he lets us.” 

In today’s San Francisco, a similar scenario is playing out following the election of Daniel Lurie (though the only beneficiary in an automotive-related windfall is the city, to which the mayor gifted a $134,000 Rivian). The wealthy political novice ran without the support — and, in some cases, against the outright opposition — of the city’s biggest big-money groups.  

This contributed to a great disturbance in the force for the city’s wealthy and politically active. After blowing through scads of other people’s money with a disastrous lack of success and productivity usually reserved for general managers of the Sacramento Kings, big-money pressure group TogetherSF imploded and merged with Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, the biggest big-money group of them all. Last week, Neighbors announced the formation of “Blueprint for a Better San Francisco,” which it described as the “evolution” of TogetherSF.

Thus begins the awkward campaign of the city’s richest rich-guy groups to, shall we say, ingratiate themselves with Lurie. But, again, only if he lets them. 

This is not a hypothetical. Shortly after the election, the mild-mannered Lurie made it known that he didn’t want to be associated with Neighbors executive director Jay Cheng. Last week, Lurie’s inner circle reiterated that the mayor still feels that way, in large part because of Cheng’s ethical misadventures. 

Neighbors and Cheng were popped last year for a $54,000 ethics fine stemming from the organization’s work spearheading the 2022 recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin. The Mark Farrell mayoral campaign, over which Cheng hovered like Banquo’s ghost, was also last year hit with an unprecedented $108,000 ethics fine on the eve of November’s election.

All of this looms large because there was Cheng at the podium at last week’s Blueprint for a Better San Francisco opening soiree on the 32nd floor of the Westin St. Francis. Scotty Jacobs, a nightlife enthusiast and online personality who garnered not quite 13 percent of the vote in November’s District 5 supervisor race, is Blueprint’s executive director. He will likely mix it up on social media and get his fair share of attention. But Cheng is, overtly, the Buster Posey here to Jacobs’ Bob Melvin. 

So, it remains to be seen how that’s going to work out. San Francisco’s wealthiest wealthy political donors have their options. Giving to the outfit run by the people who immolated vast amounts of donors’ money in 2024 is not the most intuitive choice. Neither is donating to the group helmed by the one guy the new mayor doesn’t want to deal with. 

But it’s not necessarily as counterintuitive as it seems at first blush. Scattered among the glad-handing politicians and captains of industry at Blueprint’s kickoff were regular folks. People who were attracted to messages of common sense. People of the sort that gathered to pick up trash off the city’s fetid streets. 

There’s nothing bad about organized trash-picking outings like those formerly organized by TogetherSF, though Public Works employees have grown weary of such private efforts being used to denigrate the role of public agencies, especially when the bags and trash-pickers are donated by Public Works and the sacks of refuse are eventually collected by Public Works.

It would help if private groups informed Public Works before depositing pyramids of rotting garbage on street corners in front of people’s places of business — and, no, that hasn’t always happened. But no worries: The ire, of course, will always be directed at Public Works.

Regardless, collecting filth off the streets is good, clean fun, so to speak. It’s a great opportunity to help out the city and meet fellow like-minded people who aren’t pleased with the status quo and are willing to get up off the couch and do something about it.

Which is why it was such a great entree for TogetherSF. If you clicked on the sign-ups for various trash-picking voyages, you’d be redirected to TogetherSF’s website. So this was good citizenship all right, but it was also good data mining. It was a way to get the contact information for frustrated people who wanted to do something about the plight of this city, and then send them your messages about common sense politics and politicians.  

TogetherSF is gone, but a role for that remains. TogetherSF put out voter guides and organized house parties and amassed a mailing list — a gaudy self-reported 160,000. It was full of people frustrated with what they saw on this city’s streets and motivated to do something.

TogetherSF didn’t administer stress tests or hand out copies of “Dianetics,” but you get the picture: They had their own ideas about how to solve this city’s problems and which politicians should be in charge, and they were here to recruit you. 

Blueprint could ably fill this void as it and other big-money groups gird themselves for the 2026 supervisorial elections. If the groups can ingratiate themselves with each other, and with Lurie, they’ll be a wealthy and formidable force. 

So, if you’re a big donor, where do you put your money? GrowSF has gone so far as to hire Daniel Lurie’s former consultant, Tyler Law, and put his picture on their website. AbundantSF remains the overtly urbanist, YIMBY big-money group for the donor who prefers Sunset Dunes to the Great Highway. Whither Neighbors and Blueprint? 

There is, it seems, a place for a big-money group that takes wealthy people’s money and does what they want. Because, in the end, politics is a relatively affordable endeavor for the super rich. The table stakes for philanthropy or art are so much higher; for 1 or 2 percent of the cost of a Van Gogh, a donor can have a transformative effect on this or nearly any city. 

Neighbors, unlike the other big-money groups, seeds money into campaigns. It runs independent expenditure committees. Rather than do polling or AI or whatever, it takes big donors’ money and uses it toward the ends they desire. And if those causes align with the mayor’s wishes, it apparently doesn’t matter so much if the mayor doesn’t want to associate with the group spending the money. It is associating with him. 

Until he doesn’t let them.