Eight months after dueling ballot measures promised to take a hard look at San Francisco’s 149 city commissions, it’s happening: Next week, a newly convened task force will vote on whether to eliminate 34 bodies that are currently inactive, the first step in a long streamlining process.
“Obviously we want to do the easy ones first, then we’ll tackle the other groups piece by piece,” said Jean Fraser, vice chair of the Commission Streamlining Task Force, which was formed after voters approved Proposition E on Nov. 5, 2024.
The Advisory Council on Human Rights is slated to be cut; its last known meeting date was more than 15 years ago. Others to be eliminated from the city’s code include the Graffiti Oversight Board, the Delinquency Prevention Commission and the Industrial Waste Review Board. Thirty-two of the 34 inactive bodies have not met in the last year.
This first step is easy, but the next will be harder: Everyone on the Prop. E task force agrees that the city’s commissions are an “overgrown garden,” but not on how to trim them. Ed Harrington, the task force chair and the city’s former controller from 1991 to 2008, is more sympathetic to commissions. “I think people in San Francisco do value that ability to engage with their government,” he said.
But others on the five-person task force have emphasized that commissions slow down policymaking, and don’t necessarily lead to broad public engagement.
“I believe that our elected leaders should have to make the hard decisions, and that we shouldn’t insert people between them and the hard decisions,” said Fraser. “I want them to wrestle directly.”
Prop. E was one of two measures in the election tackling the city’s dizzying number of commissions: A competing measure, Proposition D, would have set a hard cap on the number of commissions at 65. That was the most well-funded measure on the ballot at $9.5 million, and its failure led to the implosion of the group behind it.
Prop. E, which won with only some $117,000 behind it, instead proposed a process to pick and choose commissions for removal.
If 34 are eliminated next week, the Prop. E task force will have 115 advisory boards, committees, councils, commissions and other bodies left to review. All are generally tasked with overseeing department decisions or collecting public input about department decisions.
The task force largely consists of City Hall veterans: Harrington, who was also on the Prop. E campaign and appointed to the body by the measure’s chief proponent; former Supervisor Aaron Peskin; Sophie Hayward from the City Administrator’s Office; Natasha Mihal from the Controller’s Office; and Andrea Bruss from the City Attorney’s Office.
Fraser, who is the CEO of the Presidio Trust and was appointed by Mayor Daniel Lurie, spent decades in both San Mateo and San Francisco municipal governments.
The five members are on a clock. Prop. E set the task force a deadline of February 1, 2026 to make its recommendations, and the task force has an allotted 49 hours of meeting time. So far, it has spent 13 hours and has 36 left.
Despite $9.5 million spent on the competing effort to drastically reduce the number of city commissions, those behind Prop. D, have been noticeably absent from the process. Harrington said they declined to participate.
Next up, the Prop. E task force will look at each body thematically; those dealing with housing will all be assessed during the same meeting, for instance. A full calendar of the task force’s meetings will be released at next week’s meeting.
The task force members, for their part, dearly hope the public gets involved. So far, it has been mostly wonks, which Fraser said illustrates the issue behind commissions generally: They don’t bring out the broader public, only those already engaged.
“We spent half of our last meeting trying to figure out how to get people to pay attention to what we are doing,” said Fraser. “This is exactly the problem.”
I’d be happy to hear more and get involved. Please leave some info in the comments or maybe another article with emails, phone numbers and meeting times and dates.
Email commission.streamlining@sfgov.org. Meetings are held on the 1st and 3rd Wed at 1pm in City Hall room 408 and livestreamed via Webex. Recordings are posted online the following week. More info @ https://www.sf.gov/commission-streamlining-task-force
Crazy. how do employed citizens hope to have a voice? At work at 1pm
Time to cut the fat
The people on boards and commissions get perks including healthcare coverage ?
Time to cut the grift .
They can showup at board meetings and wait to speak for two min like the rest of us .
If you want to cut fat, look no further than SFPD. Plenty there to cut.
Do these people really expect for the overworked Board of Supervisors to be digging into the weeds that the commissions get into on the domain specific arcana of the various codes and practices?
Give us a 25 member Board of Supervisors with enough legislative assistants to realistically handle such a workload and we can talk.
That said, a Housing Commission with a remit to oversee the Housing Authority, Mayor’s Office of Housing, DHSH and whatever might be left over from the redevelopment successor agency would provide much needed sunshine to a big chunk of the City’s budget and coordinate the City’s housing response.
I get the value of eliminating inactive and duplicative bodies, but concerns that civilian oversight will “slow down policymaking” strikes me as uncomfortably DOGElike in this season of democracy’s disfavor.
Worth being vigilant, especially with Mayor Lurie at the helm now: he seems to think he’s CEO of the city, and so far the SFBOS seems very on-board with ceding power to him.
However, we managed to defeat the far more DOGElike version of commission reform, last November’s Proposition D, pushed by the big-money group TogetherSF (now reformed as “Blueprint”). This process stemming from Proposition E is a lot more transparent (go comment at the meetings!), and any proposed changes to commissions in the City Charter will ultimately be sent to voters to approve or reject.
Thanks for letting us know the that Task Force that is cutting commissions etc. wants public input. That is sort a vague bit of information. What kind of help and engagement do they want? And how do they want the public to be involved? Are they looking for a lot of emailed suggestions or do they want to reach out to neighborhood groups, or professionals or what exactly do they want from the public. We look forward to hearing more.