Mission District supervisor Jackie Fielder will be absent from City Hall through at least the end of June, according to a letter she sent to the Board of Supervisors clerk on Tuesday.
โFor personal reasons, I am respectfully requesting that I be excused from the Board of Supervisors meetings between April 7 and June 30, 2026,โ Fielder wrote to the clerk and Board President Rafael Mandelman.
Fielder requested to be excused from her board positions as chair of two committees, but asked โto continue to serve as the Chair of both committees upon my return.โ
Fielder has been absent from board meetings since mid-March and checked herself into a hospital for mental health reasons that month. She told Mission Local on March 27 that she would resign, but two days later her staff issued a statement saying she would stay on and seek an extended leave of absence instead.
District 9 community leaders rallied around her and urged her to stay in office, and she received statements of support from her board colleagues and Mayor Daniel Lurie.ย
San Francisco supervisors can take indefinite leave. The city charter makes it extremely difficult to remove sitting supervisors from office; they must be found guilty of โofficial misconductโ in a trial by three-fourths of their board colleagues.
Disclosure: This reporter briefly worked with Jackie Fielder in 2018 at The Worker Agency, a communications firm.
Mission nonprofits will go full Weekend at Bernieโs if they have to to keep the party line vote.
Why don’t we just cut to the chase, cut out the middle people, and float a Charter Amendment that makes Luis Granados of MEDA D9 supervisor for life?
What this means is that it is more important that the politically connected city funded nonprofit cartel doesn’t want to risk being cut off of the City’s sugar teat should Fielder resign and Lurie appoint a replacement than it is for D9 to have whatever feeble representation Fielder might once have offered.
I am sure that Jackie will now include “living with mental health challenges” to her intersectional taxonomy. The intersectional crowd values and celebrates weakness and vulnerability, fetishizes victimhood, and cannot come to terms with power.
Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote that war is a continuation of politics by other means. The converse is also true, that politics is war waged by other means. What we’ve got here is our division commander abandoning the field to care for herself while the troops, the voters and residents, are engaged in combat every day in D9.
In politics as in war, everyone is expendable. The time to mourn and do self healing is after the battle is won.
A San Francisco Supervisor taking off 3 months for mental health leave is unprecedented and indicates that the supervisor is deficient in the characteristics integral to the job of supervisoring–engaging with people with different ideas or who oppose you outright. Fielder can do neither on a good day.
D9 deserves better. Fielder should do the right thing, put the district, residents and voters before city funded politically connected nonprofits and resign or, that failing, be recalled by district voters.
You be cold, Marc,
Hey, now’s the time for you to belly up to John Arntz’s bar and run for this office.
I’ve been trying to get you to run for over 20 years.
go Niners !!
h.
What would the expectation be if Fielder had a *physical* illness that required hospitalization and extended recovery? Or heck, even just an extended vacation for several weeks?
Resignation would not be expected, but certainly some degree of temporary delegation or succession.
Iโm no fan of Fielder, but this is pretty basic stuff – who is second in command? Just because itโs a mental issue should not bypass the delegation.
You never wish anyone bad health and I hope she can recover. However, the district needs someone in that position now and not taking an unprecedented multi month rehab. How do we know she will be back within that time frame and if she has mental health issues can she adequately represent the district. Also, is this PTO, is she being paid, does she continue to earn time towards a city pension, still covered by city health benefits despite missing March through June.
True leadership is knowing when itโs time to step aside for the greater good
Jackie has been an incredible supervisor thus far. Glad that she has decided to stay on the board, she’s one of the few voices of opposition against the right-wing tech-billionaire “GrowSF” agenda.
D9 is extremely lucky to have Jackie as our supervisor. I wish for Jackie’s health and am confident that she will return from this event an even stronger champion of working people and communities of color. I couldn’t ask for a better representative in City Hall.
Iโm glad sheโs taking care of herself and will be back soon! In politics and all sectors of life we need more examples of people taking time off rather than burning out and crashing. I just wish sheโd taken time sooner. Sheโs the only SF supervisor that takes our communityโs working people and immigrants seriously.
Replace Fielder. She has been inept from Day 1. Mission deserves better.
She had a chance to clean up the Bart Stns and sheโs been MIA the whole time.
Down with the tax sucking non-profits that keep the Mission in squalor.
Out with Fielder who cannot show up to do the job she was elected to.