The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 7-4 Tuesday to pass an ordinance that makes sweeping changes to the city’s municipal codes, despite objections that the 362-page ordinance is too broad to be covered by a single vote, and concerns over changing some important reporting requirements, including those around surveillance.
The ordinance, sponsored by Board President Rafael Mandelman, originated at the city attorney’s office, whose staff partnered with a lab at Stanford University to use AI to identify redundancies in the city code.
Supervisors Myrna Melgar, Connie Chan, Jackie Fielder and Shamann Walton voted against the legislation.
Mandelman postponed a previous vote, on June 30, for two weeks after several supervisors — and Angela Calvillo, the board clerk, who seldom weighs in on legislative discussion — raised concerns that the proposal was so broad, they could not make sense of all the changes being made.
Calvillo described the ordinance as a “deviation from the norm,” and Supervisor Melgar said she relied on AI — Anthropic’s Claude — to understand the specific changes in the ordinance.
Many of the proposals reduce or remove requirements that mandate reports about certain aspects of city government.
Supervisor Fielder raised concerns about how the ordinance changed the frequency of the city’s audit of its use of surveillance technology from every year to every five years.
“I think the frequency of this report is crucial to honoring civil liberties and the intent of our city’s strong surveillance technology policy,” Fielder said.
Supervisor Walton echoed Fielder’s comments. “These reporting requirements are in place for a reason,” said Walton, who added that the ordinance should have been broken down into smaller pieces of legislation.
Melgar agreed with the substance of the changes, she told the board, but took issue with the process of combining so many of them together.
“There are policy implications for streamlining and getting rid of reports — that I think are policy decisions,” said Melgar.
“I don’t think that the process was sufficient to encompass the entire breadth of what’s happening here,” Melgar added.
Before the meeting, Melgar said she would look into introducing trailing legislation — which allows supervisors to follow up with changes to existing legislation — at a later stage, to tackle concerns that weren’t addressed before the vote.
Amendments made in the last two weeks include restoring reporting requirements that provide information to the Department of the Status on Women (among those requirements: The police department and district attorney’s office have to share domestic violence data).
The recent amendments also restore reporting requirements on sexual harassment, and for updates on the number of small businesses served by case managers at the city’s Office of Small Business.
At the meeting, Mandelman suggested that work remains to be done to streamline the city’s codes.
“I hope this is not the end, because I do think our code needs much more pruning,” he said.
This is all part of Lurie, Dorsey, Mandelman, and their billionaire backers’ “Project 2026” for San Francisco.
I hope that this ordinance finally stops his political career.
Did any of the supervisors or their staff actually read the entire thing, especially after past reporting that Melgar used a chatbot to summarize the document?
Smacks of our federal government: We vote for things but don’t read them first. Then, when it doesn’t turn out the way we wanted it to, we use the excuse that we didn’t actually read it in the first place.
Momma,
These new AI applications allow humans to create cyber agents that actually can read absolutely everything and summarize and advise on a document that size in minutes and don’t forget to add the ole ‘Reverse Promp’ where you ask your personal 24/7/365 AI agent (works for free) … ask it what else you could or should have asked and to comment further on those threads.
“What’s your agent’s name?”
The ruling class drives an omnibus.
Using AI for any reason requiring judgment is dangerous because it has no critical thinking ability and simply passes along any idiocy someone put online becauseit can’t diffentiate between fact and fiction. Anyone who thinks it’s useful should not be reelected. They obviously have not followed recent developments, like Bill Gates’ 6,000 word essay on why it’s dangerous, or the Anthropic employee who quite because industry insiders fear it could kill of humanity by the end of the decade.
The supervisors’ 7-4 vote to allow developers to pay instead of planting and maintaining trees makes it clear that the pro-developer contingent doesn’t even know why we need trees. It’s not just shade that can be provided by awnings. Trees are bio-accumulators that clean the air. And as we continue to pollute, we need more trees, not fewer. It is really time to elect smarter people who actually fully investigate the issues they are in a position to improve and not look, unfortunately, like developer shills.
Lotta methane here, Kelly,
They’re on the right track says this old dawg who has been sleeping with You Tube shows about these AI advances for a couple of years.
When my dog, Skippy and I are not out picking up trash.
(he likes a shoutout here)
A couple of observations …
This is the first instance I’ve seen where human legislators have been eclipsed by Cyber Agents and it was expected.
Yuval Harari says that language is the Operating System of the Human species and that AI has hacked it and can now use it better than we can.
No doubt Stanford’s people have both Open Claw and Hermes projects open on this matter and that Myrna’s Claude is drawing on same.
Calvillo’s inability to understand also brings up something that Harari predicted with advancing AI in that he came from the avenue of math and finance where AI is already creating algorithms beyond human comprehension and it is happening here in the SF BOS chambers and I’m glad I lived to see it cause it ain’t gonna stop now, cowboys and cowgirls.
I’d say Greg Wagner’s new IG should put a couple of dozen Hermes and Open Claw Agents with their own Sub agents on the matter as a matter of course.
In fact, make it a Skill so that the individual members can pick it up in their Cron folders when someone with an agenda seeks to use the new technology to take away even more voter rights and access to the inner workings of our vast City government.
I gotta stop studying this stuff and open my own Hermes account finally …
Kelly, I don’t know about other people but this is the first time I’ve seen humans with power parrying with computer programs instead of swords.
go Niners !!
h.
Its fair to say its too much for one bill, but sounds like the main thing dissenters took issue with was surveillance review. Which could be updated seperately
Not a coincidence that somebody wants to streamline government to make it efficient, and the DSA types are against it.
In a true socialist country, the government is usually the largest employer. But there’s a reason there are few true socialist countries: life is worse.
Not at all a “socialist” “DSA” communist or libertarian or Republican construct. Your comment reveals how little you know about the structure of San Francisco’s constitution, our City Charter and how it applies to our democratic government. San Francisco’s government structure involves two distinct categories: oversight and advisory. The Ethics Commission and the Sunshine Task Force are two essential, apolitical bodies whose primary function is to provide citizen, oversight, transparency to the public and enforcement of regulations pertaining to things like campaign finance, fiscal accountability and decorum and public accountability by elected office holders. San Francisco’s democratic government is not a corporation.
Nothing wrong with streamlining, but AI is the classic “garbage in, garbage out” that computer scientists have spoken of for decades. If we’re going to streamline, the the City Attorney and the Supervisors should be putting some thought – and some work – into it.
The reason there are few true socialist countries is that it is US policy to crush any ideology that doesn’t facilitate the frictionless transfer of wealth from the workers who create it to the ruling class that gobbles it up. Assassinated politicians, hot war, cold war, propaganda, rigged elections, death squads, sanctions, boycotts, blockades, starvation, “color” revolutions, surveillance, false flags, torture, starvation, environmental collapse, et al. The primary function of the CIA(for one example) is to crush socialism (even its mildest forms) and resistance to our empire wherever and whenever it arises.
Oh please… the DSA is moderate by western European standards.
Are you sure you don’t favor surveillance capitalism? It would be a … realist stance in our surveillance capitalist society of today.