S.F. supervisors advance $33M OpenGov extension — but without their blessing

A committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Wednesday couldn’t bring itself to take a formal stance on a proposed $33 million contract extension for a controversial permitting system that’s still grappling with basic tasks and lacks a clear plan for phasing in more complex ones. 

The Budget and Finance Committee spent hours debating whether the contract — awarded to OpenGov by Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office last year without a formal bidding process — was even fair. 

Supervisors Danny Sauter, Chyanne Chen and Matt Dorsey then opted unanimously to advance the vote on locking in OpenGov through 2031 to the full board without an up or down recommendation. 

The three supervisors were largely in agreement that they supported Lurie’s effort, in the abstract, to overhaul an archaic and redundant permitting system fragmented across multiple departments. 

But, after hours of questions about whether the procurement process was above-board, and whether the $33 million additional investment was sound amid mixed results from OpenGov’s first year, their opinions varied on the specific proposal before them — even as the deal’s proponents, in a concession, floated an option to terminate the contract after a single additional year of substandard results. 

“There is not enough data that demonstrates [OpenGov] works as intended,” Chen said before the vote. 

While Dorsey opted not to make a recommendation, he indicated on Wednesday that he’s supportive of the deal, especially in light of the proposed early termination provision.

“In my own conversations with the mayor’s office, I made clear the absence of that provision was causing me to look at the contract unfavorably,” Dorsey said.

Discussing the fairness of OpenGov being awarded its initial $5.9 million contract without a competitive bidding process, Fred Brousseau, the director of policy analysis for the board’s Budget and Legislative Analyst, summarized his report from earlier this year.

It found that Lurie’s award to OpenGov in October 2025  “did not conform to typical City practice or best practices,” but also “did not violate city requirements.”

At the meeting, Brousseau said he found transparency and fairness “lacking” from the selection process.

PermitSF director Liz Watty, who has overseen OpenGov’s implementation, acknowledged myriad lessons learned from the first year of the software and its selection process.

She admitted that she and the mayor’s office could have standardized scoring among staff of competing software programs. She said there weren’t enough staff to help OpenGov meet its performance metrics. 

But she insisted on greenlighting the $33 million extension without a full roadmap of milestones and deliverables — a lingering concern among city staffers on Wednesday, who raised an option of reducing the extension amount to $12 million.

Watty pushed back on this: “We will not see progress if we try to map that out at the beginning,” she said.

Lingering questions

Almost a year ago, Lurie’s office awarded a $5.9 million, one-year contract to overhaul the city’s byzantine and archaic permitting systems to OpenGov, a largely untested tech firm with connections to Lurie’s former nonprofit, Tipping Point. This occurred without a formal bidding process, and over the objections of departmental staff. 

At the time, the mayor’s office claimed OpenGov was the only vendor capable of rolling out the new system quickly enough. But OpenGov has since missed key deadlines by several months to roll out basic permits. The software Lurie championed still has limited functionality and, city workers say, is still only being applied to simpler tasks. 

While OpenGov is eventually supposed to consolidate the city’s permitting redundancies under one platform, three workers from different departments who spoke to Mission Local said their teams are still forced to use the old system simultaneously with OpenGov. 

The inspector general, the city’s fraud watchdog, also announced on Monday that it’s looking into OpenGov’s ability to ensure integrity in the city permitting process and “prevent improper activities.”

The inspector general — a newly created role in the controller’s office to investigate waste and abuse in the city — said it expects to release its report sometime in the fall, according to a letter to the committee regarding its OpenGov vote.

Supervisor Jackie Fielder, who called for a hearing on the lack of a competitive bidding process on the initial OpenGov award, questioned why the extension had to span a full five years.

“I can’t say for sure the contract deserves more than one year without clear deliverables,” Fielder said. 

Watty said that truncating the extension would place more uncertainty on city departments waiting to be folded into OpenGov, and that a five-year term, versus annual extensions, might be more cost-effective.

“When you buy in bulk,” she said, “you usually get a better price.”