Your humble narrator recently spoke to a San Francisco building inspector. It’s 2026, and, every day, he gives the contractors he’s dropping in on the same greeting a San Francisco building inspector could have delivered in 1926: “Permit, plans and job card, please.”
For those of you old enough to remember when checking out a library book entailed stamping a paper card, that’s more or less what a job card is. It’s a literal piece of paper in which every one of the city’s many inspectors writes his or her notes following an inspection.
It is, again, 2026 and San Francisco is still deploying the latest in pencil-on-paper technology.
In February, San Francisco went live with OpenGov, a permitting system intended to be the One Ring to rule all the myriad, archaic permitting systems. It was, in the abstract, a stellar idea. Job cards and card catalogs belong in the realm of nostalgia.
But the devil dwells in the details — and, in San Francisco, he’s got rent control.
OpenGov was unilaterally given a $5.9 million initial contract by the mayor’s office over the objections of department staff, which scored another contractor much higher. But that would be water under the bridge — if OpenGov was performing well.
Well, it isn’t, at least not yet. Mission Local’s Brandon Pho reported last week that it’s still only handling straightforward, simple permits and there is not a plan to lay out how it will matriculate to more complicated tasks or fully integrate across more city departments.
At this point, city workers from different departments told Mission Local their teams are still forced to use the old permitting system simultaneously with OpenGov.
OpenGov has not yet replaced a paper job card with a virtual version, meaning inspectors cannot presently review their colleagues’ notes from prior inspections via the system. On non-OpenGov permit inspections, inspectors are still relying on pencil-on-paper job cards to review their colleagues’ notes.
“Lots of people,” laments one inspector, “got horrible, horrible handwriting.”
No matter. On Wednesday, a Board of Supervisors committee advanced a vote on extending OpenGov’s contract to the full board. While there is now an option to pull the plug after one more year, this contract could extend to 2031 at an additional $33 million.
Again, there have been no coherent plans yet presented on how OpenGov will achieve the complicated tasks it presently cannot handle. Nor is there a plan to fix the myriad problems popping up on even the simple tasks it is now assigned to do.
In other news, last Monday the mayor’s office announced a major shift in how it would structure future contracts for homeless services, with providers now being subjected to performance-based metrics. Coming in the same week the supes advanced the warts-and-all OpenGov contract, it’s enough to give you whiplash.
The nonprofits ministering to the city’s homeless will have to show their work, explain how they’ll meet their goals, and be compensated based upon deliverables.
The for-profit, untested tech firm shoehorned into its position by the mayor’s office, meanwhile, was subjected to none of this.
Is compensating homeless providers based on their deliverables and performance a good idea? No.
It’s a great idea. With Chief of Health and Human Services Kunal Modi leading a platoon of McKinsey people now ensconced atop city government, it’s no surprise that San Francisco would be gravitating toward performance-based contracting, just as Major League general managers have been gravitating toward analytics.
Within the realm of San Francisco homeless services, this has been in the works for years. But first, the city had to work to standardize homeless service contracts, so that outfits doing similar things aren’t compensated in wildly different ways under wildly different contracts.
The next step is to lard performance-based contracts with tangible deliverables. It won’t be enough anymore to simply be remunerated for every toilet paper roll you buy or bottle of water you disseminate. Now providers will be incentivized to meet the actual outcomes that the city is seeking.
The impetus for doing this, we’re told, is not the reason half-bright misanthropes on Twitter seem to think it is. The goal here is not to punish lazy or even criminal providers who amass government money and don’t do work.
Rather, it’s to detect problems before they become catastrophic: Performance-based contracting will require intensive and ongoing contract monitoring, and the city can potentially intervene in a constructive way, rather than a punitive one.
Why has this taken so long? Many reasons, but the most significant one is: It’s hard. Many homeless service providers are on five-year contracts with set renewal terms; the city was not in a position to simply alter them by fiat.
The city has to determine which deliverables are true signifiers of “success” and what success in this realm even looks like — and incentivize providers to produce that.
But the devil, once again, dwells in the details: Formulating these contracts is a bear.
If the city is sloppy in the way it incentivizes providers — and rewards them merely for the raw volume of people served — yes, that could lead to more able-bodied homeless people getting services and attention that would better be directed to harder-up people with intransigent problems.
At some point, San Francisco is going to have to think deeply about what it wants to get out of shelters, outreach, permanent housing — everything. It’s hard.
Less hard, city officials say, would be formulating a performance-based contract for OpenGov — with actual deliverables and deadlines, and carrots and sticks for meeting them or missing them.
This, of course, is exactly what the city didn’t do.
On Wednesday, an analyst with the Board of Supervisors Budget and Legislative Analyst said that future payments to OpenGov would be tied to deliverables. But those deliverables have not yet been defined. Nor has the timeline for delivering them.
It’s a bit odd to be working out these basics well after a contract is awarded — let alone extended.
The Budget and Legislative Analyst concluded that the mayor’s office did not violate the law, but did violate best practices in the awarding of this contract. But, to be frank: If this city’s two prior elected mayors and their right-hand people eschewed a formal bidding process and unilaterally directed a contract to a favored provider to which they had connections, it would’ve elicted calls for an FBI investigation, not a shrug.
So that was an inauspicious way for OpenGov to start things off. And it’s still not going great. OpenGov cannot yet handle the complex tasks that populate the San Francisco permitting system.
And if the simpler tasks it is used for trigger ancillary requirements, OpenGov cannot yet deal with it — forcing city workers to continue using the archaic software system OpenGov was supposed to supplant. Or, you know, read horrible, horrible handwriting.
City inspectors and contractors tell me that it’s slower to turn around a rudimentary permit on OpenGov than it would have been to wander down to the Building Department and get it over the counter.
Yes, installing new, overarching systems is complicated. But lots of things in city government are complicated — like homeless services. A wave of the hand and “it’ll get fixed” isn’t very reassuring. But that’s essentially what we’re doing with OpenGov.
“This is such an obviously good move that we wonder why it has taken this long to get here,” was the hot take of political pressure group GrowSF, regarding performance-based contracting for homeless service providers.
“Every city contract should have clear deliverables, and if we aren’t getting what we’re paying for, then we should end the contract.”
Again, the contrast between the responsible new approach for homeless contracting and the city’s handling of OpenGov could give you whiplash. Assuming, of course, you give it even a moment’s thought.
The Building Department recently circulated an internal memo noting that, come Sept. 14, plumbing, electrical and mechanical permits will come under the aegis of OpenGov. Also on Sept. 14, customers applying for simple, “no plans” kitchen and bath permits will be directed to OpenGov.
Good luck to them: It will be a test for the nascent system. This is the sort of “deliverable” that you could’ve tied to a “performance-based metric.” But, again, that’s not how this went. So, hopefully things go well.
But, if they don’t— well, hopefully they do.
“It’s like the Iran war,” grumbles the San Francisco building inspector. “We launched into this thing without a plan.”
What a ridiculous comparison\. You’re comparing two completely different issues as if they’re remotely equivalent\.
We’re talking about **decades of failure and billions of dollars poured into a corrupt homeless\-services system**, with very little to show for it, while vulnerable people continue to suffer\. And yet somehow you have the audacity to compare that with spending a few million dollars—and taking some additional time—to build and implement a new, extremely complex and robust platform?
Apparently, when it comes to the homeless\-services machine, there’s no limit on the budget, no deadline, and no expectation of meaningful results\. So, by that logic, what’s **one more year and a few more million dollars** to actually build a system that will work?
Lisa —
Is there a scenario where not having deliverables in a contract and not being able to provide a clear map to functionality is a good thing? Because that’s what you’re advocating for.
JE
An “apples-to-oranges” comparison, if there ever was one.
The homelessness crisis and the continuing failure of the SF government — in concert with connected non-profits — to successfully address it has been going on for decades, whereas comprehensive permitting reform — along the lines of which the Lurie Administration is boldly attempting — has only been underway since January 8, 2025 when Mayor Lurie assumed office.
Glad I’m not the only one who feels the same.
What is Lurie trying to hide?
It’s pretty simple, Homeless services groups now have to show and meet the deliverables for their contracts as they should. But Lurie’s buddies need not do that. Lurie’s Open Gov buddies have been approved for an additional 33 million, without providing any sort of proof of the product’s viability or ability to provide deliverables on time.
All political stunts on both fronts…be tough on the weak, make excuses for the white collar bros ( see Liz Watty ) , just to make it seem like he is a go getter to the masses. Reelection anyone? LOL
Expect lower than anticipated results from Open Gov and from the Homeless agencies…
Why is the mayor of the richest city in the world, with the most billionaires of any city, imposing austerity measures and making these groups beg for funding every year?
Perhaps it’s because the “groups” have a history of big claims that their work will “help” the “problem” – and by every possible measure there’s never been any improvement in said “problem”.
Hi,
Joe Eskanazi is a good writer and editor and reporter, but, I think he gets it wrong on the permit process changes. I have been buying permits in SF since 1977. The plan to change the process addresses a problem that doesn’t exist for plumbing and electrical permits. Since the introduction of online permit servicing for these specialty permits, there have been no significant hiccups.
The advent of Job Cards was a really good change, as the existence of a written paper trail has made the tracking of our work much simpler. I don’t need a user name and password to read a job card. It is often the only paper trail we have, since most residential projects don’t even pretend to offer usable mechanical drawings. Everyone agrees that the building permit process could be streamlined, but throwing out the entire system without any clear idea of a replacement won’t work, and paper can’t be hacked.
WHY WAS PROJECT HOMELESS CONNECT DEFUNDED? It was successful, scandal-free, and involved large swaths of the community.
I think that the difference here is between a legacy system that is failing and a new system to replace a failing legacy system that’s still in the implementation phase.
The City funded the homeless services ecosystem to develop and thrive over the past several decades while not making a dent in public perceptions of public squalor.
There are always risks in deploying new software system, see SFUSD’s disastrous payroll system, that are usually related to taking a somewhat general purpose software system and customizing it to the particular practices of a bureaucracy. Nobody knows what beasts are under the next rock and how many resources it will take to account for it.
And it is not like the ecosystem of homeless providers have never played the political card to evade accountability themselves. There are so many different agencies addressing different facets of the problem but in no way being coordinated.
Newsom’s Care Not Cash created a guaranteed revenue stream that many nonprofits jumped on, others changed their business model to take advantage of. Now that there is incumbency, we see the predictable howling once accountability is demanded.
Let us hope that the Gubbio Project is the first to face the axe.
Showers, toilets, showers, and naps are quantifiable positives for people who are otherwise left to die.
Planning and ScopeCreep are the biggest delaying factors in software development. People ask me “how much is a website” and I tell them “how long is a ball of string?”. There’s no way this new company had any idea how all these programs worked, even if the api/integration docs were published, it would still probably take years to complete. If people keep demanding updates and reports and changes and other crap, it can push the budget out of control. This is not just government. I don’t know what fantasy world some of these anti-homeless shelter people live in, but this is a systemic problem literally caused by people who hate homeless shelters and attacked all those programs, demanding private business would do it “more efficiently”, so the compromise they made was to hand it off to individual non-profits. NOBODY on the left wanted that as the fix. NOBODY on the right wanted that as a *fix*, they wanted it as a failure. Then they could eliminate this multi million dollar investment by finding a few people hiringin their cousins or whatever….. shit that happens in EVERY private business… I’m sure 99% of “moderates” are agast at this statement, but anyone ever involved in politics knows this is *exactly* how these political groups work together. (and by right wing, in this city, it is what are now called “moderates”)
No one can lie better than a building inspector,
The guy who taught them just got out of prison.
The woman who sent him there is now the City’s Inspector General.
She should be involved in this from the get-go.
A tool chest full of the right algorithms is enough to finally overcome this pack.
go Niners in two days in Australia ??!!
h.
Contracts entered into by African American or Chinese mayors are highly suspect and probably criminal. If the Mayor’s last name is Newsom or Lurie we should just acknowledge corruption isn’t possible.
DBI is like The the Wizard of Oz. DBI PT/Oracle system has always had the unprecedented ability for decades to expire permits and knows it, unlike in the WoO the 3 didn’t know their abilities. Reference when DBI did in the mass expiration of all expired building permits in 2011 in the PTS of inspector paper job cards mandated from a dictum from upper management. This required hand writing on the back of thousands upon thousands paper job cards the date of the expiration, Expired comment, and the signature of the inspector on the back of the DBI Inspector Job card. This was a Sisyphean task that many many of the Inspector Job Cards records of government documents destined to be memorialized in DBI Microfilm were unlawfully destroyed. A public comment speaker at the Building Inspection Commission presented this as memorialized on SFGovtv archives of witnessing a Building Inspector show the speaker the stain mark on his rear concrete patio when he used charcoal lighter fluid to burn hundreds of paper Inspector Job Cards. Did the BIC ever investigate or the Chief of Integrity the illegal destruction of government documents as reported to the BIC??? This modus operandi has also allowed over the years if a connected contractor or the city family did not want a written comment on a paper Inspector Job Card that allowed for the Job Card to be destroyed omitting unlawful correction comments by the honest district building inspector and reassigning to a sycophant building inspector creating a new paper job card to be filled out using comments from the contractors paper job card and say duplicate job card. 3 card Monte perfected obfuscating the public perceptions of the shenanigans at DBI. Original inspector job card lost duplicate inspector job card created on the new inspector job card. The building inspector said DBI’s reason for keeping the issued expired building inspector job card was like food for the days the inspector has no scheduled inspections. The inspector was told to leave DBI at 8:30 a.m. and not come back until 3:00 p.m. and put lots of miles on the city car before GPS. Calistoga, Sacramento I understand. The building inspector was told to enter 8 inspections 45 minutes for field inspections for each expired building permit to justify the total 6 hours in the field doing inspections. OpenGov cannot do what PTS decades ago could??? It is appalling that a building inspector cannot reference previous building inspector comments like they could on the old PTS. Acela 2.0.. I thought we learned from the failure of the last private cash cow with double overrun costs. Deja Vu all over. Steely Dan L. at the helm of this next Titanic mistake???
If true this is hilarious/depressing, the guy couldn’t even obtain a charcoal grill from Costco or an aluminum catering thing or some kind of receptacle to 1. Conceal evidence of a crime, and, 2. Avoid unsightly char stains on the patio? What a slob!
Thanks for the information assuming your stories are genuine. If fake then still humorous.
However I cannot approve of comparing goofy crooked and dim Malibu Dan with tuneful and thought-provoking Steely Dan. Please review discography and reconsider, thanks!
SF1906,
That’s a wonderful pile of data you have there and I believe every word of it.
I’ve worked for 7 different city departments for different cities from Clemson, South Carolina to St. Louis to Springfield, Mo. to LA to here and purt near every one of them had a scam going on.
I was an Electrician’s Helper 3 which meant ditch digger in St. Louis and two of us on the crew I was on were honest (means we only stole our labor) and two were steeling tons of old street wire still buried between the lights by the ton. It was a thick copper wire wrapped in leg and final wrapped in some kind of metal and people would drive by and see these guys sweating in the heat that reached 100 degrees and think the city workers sure did work hard when, in fact, they were stealing in broad daylight and like Nuru, a couple of the top supervisors built houses out of the spoils.
I used to think high salaries would curb theft but it seems to only fuel them to go for more and more and more.
The head of the SFPOA is a patrolman and he took down over half a million dollars last year and said when he was elected President that his number one goal was more money and I’m not saying he backs up on his checks but $300,000 in overtime does seem a bit excessive.
Lurie’s on the right track to bring in new blood and I hope they have or gain enough skill to put together algorithms that trace every scheme cause it is becoming more and more difficult to hide from AI so to speak.
As for the actual labor, I’d like to invite Musk to send one of his robots to follow my dog and I around on our Volunteer trash route and map it for the bot that replaces me.
lol
Again, where is the new Inspector Genral in all of this cause they should be riding point.
go Niners !!
h.