California street-vending bill, killed last year, is resurrected today

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As state bills go, SB 925 was extremely local: a small carveout, for San Francisco and San Francisco only, that once again gave the city’s police department the ability to enforce laws against selling stuff on the sidewalk without a permit. 

Specifically, the law would have allowed officers to cite vendors for possessing the kind of stuff that is usually stolen, often from a business nearby, like laundry detergent, bottles of liquor and T-bone steaks — an attempt to control the chaotic street vending conditions that had overtaken Mission Street since the pandemic.

“Who knows if it would have even worked,” said then-District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen of SB 925, which died in committee in August 2024, dashing her hopes of reforming the street vending situation in the Mission District before she was termed out of office. “But at least it was something.” 

Today, Ronen’s hope is revived: Sen. Scott Wiener, the bill’s author, has re-introduced the legislation and it is being heard in committee on Wednesday. This year, Wiener hopes, it will pass and be signed into law.

“I’ve done everything I can to lay groundwork with the committees so that it moves forward. I cannot guarantee that it will pass, but we definitely have a path to get it passed,” said Wiener in a live interview with Mission Local’s Joe Eskenazi earlier this month.

Today, just like last year, a caravan of supporters — including half a dozen permitted vendors, members of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco, and a group of seniors who say are affected by illegal vending around SoMa — are heading to Sacramento to speak in favor of the legislation. This year again, the law also has the local officials like Mayor Daniel Lurie.

With one exception: Supervisor Jackie Fielder, unlike her predecessor, is not supportive. 

“At the moment, I have more concerns than reasons to back this, especially in a Trump administration,” said Fielder in an interview with Mission Local in January. While she supports community policing, she said, she is concerned about the risks of officers interacting with undocumented vendors and potentially resulting in deportation.

Violence, threats, murders plague BART plazas

SB 925, which failed in August and is now being introduced as SB 276, was an attempt to mitigate the unintended consequences of the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act, SB 946, which originated in Los Angeles and passed into state law in 2018. 

That law was designed to protect street vendors from police harassment. But in the pandemic-era Mission District, it led to a tightly-knit group of sellers of mostly handmade crafts around the 24th Street BART Station being replaced by frequently warring factions of fencers of stolen goods. 

At both Mission BART plazas, vendors choked the sidewalks. An organized criminal enterprise began extorting protection money from sellers in the area, leading to the kind of violence that has become relatively rare in San Francisco. From August 2022 to July 2023, there were three killings at or near the plazas.

Ronen heard rumors that the worst trouble originated with a criminal group that had relocated to California after a crackdown in New York. It was the kind of environment that the Department of Public Works, which was now responsible for enforcing vending permits, was not inclined to enter, especially after some plaza inhabitants threatened to follow them home and kill them. 

City officials and local groups joined hands. For months last year, San Francisco electeds and a Mission District street-vending association worked in tandem to push for enforcement, but protecting street vending was the No. 1 priority for the Hispanic caucus in the state legislature, said Ronen. “We couldn’t touch that holy grail.” 

Still, sympathetic state legislators — like Wiener — could change the penal code so that it only impacted San Francisco, said Ronen. SB 925 was born. 

Killed at last minute despite widespread support

The bill, if passed, would have given San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors the ability to draft a list of commonly stolen goods across the city. If a vendor was in possession of one of those items and failed to show a permit, they’d receive an infraction for the first two offenses.

A third infraction would have resulted in a misdemeanor and up to six months in jail. The law would not have applied to permitted vendors or those who sell most types of food.      

SB 925 was supported by Ronen, then-Mayor London Breed, the Mission Vendors Association, and Police Chief Bill Scott. Public Works Director Carla Short said the law would have given police enough leeway to deal with the issue without over-criminalizing people who weren’t selling likely stolen goods. 

“In San Francisco, we are working hard to make our streets safer and more welcoming for all. SB 925 would greatly help us get a handle on the sale of stolen goods, all while taking a narrow approach that specifically targets bad actors,” said Breed in a press release in June.

For a while, it all looked good. The bill unanimously passed the State Assembly’s Local Government Committee on June 26, 2024, and its Public Safety Committee on July 2, 2024. The momentum made Ronen, the author of the Mission vending ban, optimistic for the bill’s success. 

Then, in less than five seconds on the morning of Aug. 15, the bill died in the State Assembly’s appropriation committee. 

“SB 925 Wiener, San Francisco street vendors, held in committee,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, the chair of the committee, who represents parts of Oakland as well as Berkeley, San Pablo and Richmond. 

The bill had been killed at the last minute. Wiener, for his part, said he didn’t know why his bill died.

“There are some times when bills get held for political reasons. Sometimes bills just get held, and there’s no ascertainable reason. And you never get an actual explanation about why your bill was held. Sometimes you sort of know. Sometimes you don’t know,” said Wiener during the public interview earlier in March.

For Ronen, ‘one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever dealt with’

It was, Ronen said, a monumental setback for her efforts to rein in street vending before her term ended.

“It was a huge blow to us, because we were depending on that to enforce the laws better,” said Ronen. Part of the reason was that Public Workers staff — even if they were inclined to enforce city street vending permits — aren’t on duty 24 hours, the way police are. “At night, SFPD could enforce our permitting vendor laws, and that would make it a lot easier to ensure that Mission Street is free of fencing operations. Unfortunately, the bill died.”

Ronen said that, while Wicks put forward the motion, it had been the decision of Speaker Robert Rivas to hold the bill in committee and, effectively, kill it.

Rivas’ office denied that he had killed the bill. In a statement, a spokesperson described Rivas’ passing of some of the “toughest retail theft and property crime laws in a generation.” 

Wicks’ office, for her part, declined to comment. Wiener, asked in October and again earlier this month about Rivas’ role, said he did not know what happened to his bill.

Still, state-level legislative staff said the way SB 925 died could indicate the speaker, Rivas, had wanted it killed. 

“The chair has massive influence on the fate of a bill, particularly in the appropriations committee — that’s why it’s such a powerful position,” said Steven Maviglio, former deputy chief of staff for State Assembly speakers Fabian Núñez and Karen Bass. The committee controls all state legislation that would have a fiscal impact above $150,000. Often, Maviglio said, the lack of money becomes an easy excuse.

“It’s a clean way to kill a bill. There’s not a big public fight about it. It’s just read off on a list one day, and that’s the end of that,” he said.

Maviglio said that it is odd for a speaker to intervene in a local bill like SB 925, unless someone — like another legislator or the governor — had asked him to. 

Ronen, for her part, lamented that her successor in the District 9 seat couldn’t inherit a solution to a problem that had come to mark her last term in office.

“My biggest goal, and I didn’t care who won the District 9 seat, was to do everything I could to fix it for them, so they didn’t have to start out their time as supervisor dealing with literally one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever dealt with in my life,” said Ronen.

Ronen’s successor, Fielder, said in January that one of her first goals as supervisor is to bring back permanent street vending in an organized way and keep sidewalks walkable. But that would not include supporting Wiener’s bill as envisioned.

Wiener, for his part, is optimistic that this year will be different.

“Last year’s setback won’t stop me from fighting for San Francisco,” he wrote, “and we’re hard at work to do what we can at the state level to improve street conditions in the Mission and throughout the City.”