‘We are nowhere near a decision:’ A long day of S.F. budget talks

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Update: At 2 a.m. on Thursday, supervisors passed the budget after a late-night session.

Wednesday was “Budget Day,” for the five city supervisors who make up the Budget and Appropriations Committee, which means that it was essentially a long-distance marathon, but for meetings.

At 10 a.m., the supervisors walked into their conference rooms and closed the doors to confer privately with each other and with the mayor’s staff. Every two or three hours, they would re-emerge to announce that, no, still they hadn’t agreed on a budget yet.  

Today’s goal: To reach an agreement on the small percentage of the budget that the supervisors control. During the last budget cycle, supervisors were responsible for $75 million of the then-$14.6 billion budget, or 0.2 percent. The mayor directly controlled 30 times as much of the budget, or $2.3 billion.

Mayor Daniel Lurie’s $15.9 billion budget draft calls for slashing 1,400 city jobs, and cuts to hundreds of millions in city funding for nonprofits.

The Committee has the power to restore some of that funding by taking it from other city departments. Known as the “add-back” process, the amount of funding at play is essentially a rounding error in the city’s budget. But the fortunes of some nonprofits and city workers rise and fall on what decisions are made with those fragments of city funding. 

Supervisors are under pressure from nonprofits and city workers who may lose their funding and jobs. Hundreds rallied at City Hall on Monday, unfurling banners and leading chants of  “Whose budget? Our budget!” before a nine-hour-long meeting of the committee. 

Wednesday was relatively quiet compared to Monday’s uproar. About two dozen people sat patiently in the hearing room as the day wore on, most affiliated with a nonprofit whose funding is close to being cut.

One of them, Adrian Tirtanadi, the Executive Director of Open Door Legal, is on the 15th day of a hunger strike. He sat at the Board of Supervisors hearing room all day, along with members from the Latino Task Force and the Coalition on Homelessness. Open Door, a nonprofit that provides civil legal aid to low-income residents, is poised to lose roughly $2 million in funding, along with six other legal-aid nonprofits. 

But shortly before 5 p.m., approximately two dozen protesters led by the People’s Budget Coalition marched through City Hall from the mayor’s office to the Board of Supervisors. They led a procession through the hallways, chanting “What do we want? A people’s budget!” as they passed in front of the supervisors’ office doors. 

Adding to the tension of Budget Day is the fact that the city attorney has put the Budget and Appropriations Committee in the hot seat.

The San Francisco Standard reported that, earlier this month, the city attorney’s office sent out a memo to supervisors warning that Lurie’s proposed changes to homeless funding may be against city law, raising the risk that, if they adhere too closely to Lurie’s proposal, the budget could be open to legal challenges.

Lurie wants to use $89 million in funding intended for housing under Proposition C to, instead, pay for temporary shelter beds. He also wants to allocate another $3 million for 89 more temporary beds at Jerrold Commons in Bayview. But Prop. C originally required that 50 percent of its funds be used for permanent supportive housing, prompting the city attorney’s warning memo.

Lurie will announce his final budget on Monday, June 30. The full Board of Supervisors negotiates on the budget further throughout July, until it is ratified on August 1.

At 5 p.m., Committee Chair Supervisor Connie Chan emerged from the legislative chambers and walked into the hearing room. The two dozen nonprofit leaders and other interested parties remaining in the halls walked in after her.

“My apologies,” Supervisor Chan said to the assembled group. “We are nowhere near a decision.” This was to be expected; on Budget Day, an agreement is often not reached until late into the night. With that, the crowd in the hearing room was escorted out and the doors were once again closed. 

Minutes before the supervisors are slated to meet again at 7 p.m., protesters again began chanting, this time singing, “Don’t wait for a prayer, stand up to the mayor.” 

When supervisors convened again, protesters brought their chants into the hearing room. “What are you reading?” asked one audience member, as supervisors studied papers in front of them. 

Supervisors then accepted some Budget and Legislative Analyst recommendations before recessing for another two hours, only to meet at 9 p.m. in front of a still-lively audience before recessing again.

Supervisors will meet again at 11 p.m. with, perhaps, a final budget decision.