At a conservative-leaning forum looking for solutions for San Francisco, city politicos celebrated pragmatism, efficiency, results, public-private partnership, and — everyone present was a fan of Mayor Daniel Lurie.
“How do you attract more of us, people who have business experiences, who have run organizations effectively, to come and work in city government?” asked former school board member Ann Hsu from the audience, questioning Ned Segal, Lurie’s policy chief responsible for housing and economic development.
Segal said he hopes to be a role-model for more movement from business to city government.
“I hope that I can be successful enough in this role … [so that] a number of other people might look and say, ‘I’d like to do that too,'” he said. “There isn’t great precedent in San Francisco for people wanting to leave the private sector and come to City Hall.”
The exchange echoed many during the six panels at a “Renewing San Francisco’s Promise” event held Wednesday at a California Street ballroom. The so-called solutions summit, aimed to identify “practical solutions that deliver real results for the city,” was hosted by a D.C.-based conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
Their local partner was political pressure group Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a group that has raised millions to rid the city of progressives. Jay Cheng, the group’s recently resigned executive director, was originally scheduled to be a speaker.
Current district attorney Brooke Jenkins was perhaps the second most popular politician among the audience and speakers, only surpassed by Lurie. Jenkins kicked off her panel on public safety by saying that local judges are making decisions that “are based on ideology, are based in a lack of competence and experience in functioning in a criminal courthouse. It is leading to bad outcomes on the street,” she said.
Robert Doar, president of the American Enterprise Institute and moderator of the panel, said residents feel strongly about security in San Francisco but are afraid to speak up because they don’t want to be called racist or Republicans.
“There’s nothing racist about saying you want safety,” Jenkins said. Her goal is to help “people understand the majority cannot be silenced by the faction that is more extreme. We have to serve the majority.”
“People have argued that it’s a binary choice between fairness and equality, and justice and public safety — no, it is not, all of those things can coexist at once,” said Jenkins, who’s half-Black and half-Latina. “Quite frankly, when we don’t do that job, it is people of color that suffer because they are statistically, overwhelmingly the victims of crime.”
The audience of around 100 people, mostly leaders in various industries and groups in town, was most engaged when an audience member threw a question on academic excellence at school district superintendent Maria Su.
“Is it okay to pursue academic excellence or is it racist to do so?” he asked.
“Oh my goodness,” Su said, as part of a panel discussing issues including chronic absenteeism at San Francisco public schools. “The most inequitable thing that we as a school district and quite frankly, as a country can do is teach some kids to read and other kids not to read. So for me, it is not racist that all of our students are held to the highest standards possible. It is actually an equitable distribution of education.”
“I hope the teacher’s union agrees with that,” a member of the audience interjected. “I believe so! Because they are educators as well,” Su replied.
School board commissioner Supryia Ray chimed in, taking eighth-grade algebra as an example, which 82 percent of San Francisco voters voted in a nonbinding 2024 measure to restore.
Ray said that despite the vote she saw resistance. “I think there is a very significant cultural and ideological sense in the school system that … is very difficult for some folks to change their orientation or their way of thinking.”
Speakers praised a Board of Supervisors that works in concert with the mayor, and the involvement of big-money groups in politics.
Rafael Mandelman, president of the Board of Supervisors, said during a panel on San Francisco’s economic revitalization that the board’s relationship with Mayor London Breed’s administration “was toxic and bad for the functioning of the city and our ability to do anything.”
But now “the mayor and the Board of Supervisors can come together to do potentially politically challenging things that may be necessary.”
That shift happened only because “regular San Franciscans who were not attached to labor or nonprofits … decided that they were going to engage in our politics and spend a lot of money on it,” Mandelman added. Before the shift took place, “there were people who were interested in doing more pragmatic things and they couldn’t get oxygen.”
For instance, the city had a 10 to 15 year experiment with drug decriminalization, which turned out to be “a big bad” failure, the board president continued. The shift started with the 2022 recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin, he said.
Supervisor Matt Dorsey also celebrated the shift in San Francisco’s political environment, especially when it comes to issues including drug use and chronic homelessness. When he was appointed as a supervisor in 2022, he said, “the political environment was very different about what we could talk about.”
“Tough love is the only love there is, and nothing we are doing to tolerate or enable public drug use is helping anybody,” he said, “what I found was San Franciscans were there. It was the city hall leaders who weren’t quite there.”