The deadline looms. San Francisco’s Commission Streamlining Task Force has until February 2026 to make recommendations on which of the city’s 131-odd commissions to nix. Much like democracy, it is getting messy.
People who campaigned for Proposition E, which created the task force, now say that it has gone off the rails. The task force, they say, is taking up matters unrelated to its ostensible mission — and increasingly mirrors the effect of the billionaire-backed effort, Proposition D, it was created to defeat.
Prop. D, the rival ballot measure, promised to cut the number of city commissions, but also would have directly transferred power from lower branches of government to the mayor, and significantly weakened the police commission.
That task force has, so far, recommended to change more than half of the commissions. It also recommends taking the authority to hire and fire the police chief away from the Police Commission and putting that authority into the hands of the mayor — and giving the mayor sole power to hire and fire the Police Commission’s four mayoral appointees.
Prop. E’s backers, say they only intended a pruning of the city’s admittedly overgrown commission system. Instead, they got a task force that is seeking to change how those commissions actually function. So how did it come to this?
Well, in retrospect, the language of Prop. E leaves a lot open to interpretation.
Empowering the task force to “recommend changing, eliminating, or combining city commissions” does give it the ability to weaken commissions in ways that are “pretty similar” to what Prop. D would have done, said Ed Harrington, San Francisco’s controller from 1991 to 2008 and a proponent of the measure.
It is, however, happening via an open public process, instead of just unilaterally handing that power over to the mayor.
Looking back, “most of the energy” of the Prop. E campaign “was focused on stopping Prop. D,” said former planning commissioner and Prop. E backer Doug Engmann. Implementation was secondary. “We didn’t have any pre-conceived notions of how the task force is going to operate.”
Does it matter what the law’s backers wanted?
San Francisco’s earliest commissions were created in the city charter partly to balance San Francisco’s strong-mayor system.
Michael Moritz, the local billionaire who backed Prop. D to the tune of at least $3.2 million last year, described it as “the greatest gift anybody has given to a mayor in the recent history of San Francisco,” referring to giving the mayor the power to eliminate entire commissions, as well as hire and fire the heads of those commissions.
As gifts go, it was one that San Francisco’s voters declined to chip in on. Prop. D was defeated, handily, by Prop. E, despite having a budget of $80,000 to Prop. D’s nearly $10 million from Moritz and political pressure group TogetherSF.
To Harrington, who supported Prop. E and is now chair of the task force, a vote in favor of Prop. E was also a vote for maintaining the power of commissions as a hedge against a strong mayor.
Harrington said other members of the task force are less inclined to take this view. He found this out the hard way when he tries to convince his fellow task force members to follow what he thought Prop. E had set out to do.
When he tries to explain. “Their response is, ‘You can’t tell us why people voted for D versus E or E versus D.,’” Harrington said.
A view from the inside
The task force, by design, is stocked with representatives of different city departments. One is a “representative of organized labor, representing the public sector” appointed by the president of the Board of Supervisors (that would be Harrington).
Andrea Bruss is representing the City Attorney’s Office, Natasha Mihal is representing the Controller’s Office, Sophie Hayward is representing the City Administrator’s Office.
The last and newest member is Sophia Kittler, representing the Mayor’s office. Lurie tapped her to replace mayoral appointee Jean Fraser, who resigned in mid-September.
Those other task force members declined to be quoted, except via the public relations arm of their respective departments. It’s clear they believe they are following Prop. E’s protocol.
“The scope of work for the Task Force was defined by Proposition E, and as a group the Task Force has approached that work, and each set of recommendations, with care. While there are certainly occasional differences of opinion, the Task Force reaches consensus on most issues,” wrote Angela Yip, spokesperson for the City Administrator’s Office, on behalf of Hayward.
“The Task Force members are working hard to accomplish the stated purpose of Proposition E,” wrote Jen Kwart, spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office, on behalf of Bruss.
Engmann, the former planning commissioner, is not hugely surprised at this stance.
“I don’t think they are that political but they are city employees working for the city,” Engmann said. “Their inclination is that the mayor should have more power.”
Like the Police Commission, the task force is also recommending that the Fire Commission, the Recreation and Park Commission, and the Public Utilities Commission hand over their power of hiring and firing their department heads to the mayor.
What will happen with these recommendations remains to be seen. If they make it onto a ballot measure and pass the Board of Supervisors, even then there’s no guarantee that voters will vote that measure into law.
“Prop. E was supposed to trim the fat, get rid of some of the duplicates, get rid of the dead wood. It is not to destroy the commission system, but to keep it robust and alive,” said Jim Stearns, a political strategist who worked on its campaign last year.
“I sincerely hope they remember that so that they don’t spend two years coming up with a plan only to be rejected by the voters,” he said.
Sunny Angulo, who co-wrote Prop. E, could agree. “
It is an opportunity to take a hard look at the body and figure out how to make the process better, how to have more meaningful oversight and more training, and how to reduce some of the cost for staff, so the commissions are actually useful,” Angulo said.
“I know it’s hard,” Angulo added. “But if they don’t do it right this time, when are they gonna have the chance to do it again?”
Aaron Peskin, the former supervisor who wrote Prop. E, thinks the process, at least, is happening in public meetings with public engagement.
“Prop. E said that whatever the task force comes up with, the voters get to vote on it,” Peskin said. “Is this process perfect? No. No process is perfect. But it’s being done in public … This is exactly the opportunity for people to say that it’s going well or badly.”
“At the end of the day, if the task force and the Board of Supervisors don’t get it right, the voters will get to decide,” Peskin added.
Got to love it!
This is ridiculous. We voted for Prop E and against Prop D because we didn’t want an unaccountable, corruption-prone concentration of power in the mayor’s office. But these recommendations would give us exactly that.
As I said when Prop D was on the ballot, this would create toothless Kabuki-theater commissions. Appointed by the mayor with no confirmation process, and able to be removed at will by the mayor also with no confirmation process, commissioners will obviously vote the mayor’s party line every time. It’s a perversion of the whole idea of having commissions at all.
Voters rejected that by defeating Prop D. It may not be against the law to just give us the same crap, but it’s certainly against voter intent.
The premise of this article is that the people who wrote Prop. E should get to control the outcome of the Prop. E process. That premise is incorrect. If the writers of Prop. E wanted a certain outcome, they could have proposed a proposition with that outcome. Instead the Prop. created a process; it didn’t dictate the outcome of the process. As far as the outcome of that process, the writers of Prop. E’s opinions matter the same as mine or yours: if they are S.F. residents, they’ll get a vote. Former Sup. Peskin has it right at the end of the article; the rest of the article is just silly.
Perhaps the Prop E board is seeing the best way to fix what they’re supposed to fix. Perhaps giving more to the mayor to do is the best way to run the City.
And now we have another example of the mess that Arron Peskin created and continues to create.
Aaron Peskin created yet another diversion and another commission on top of other commissions through Prop E, in a successful effort to block Proposition D. I guess Peskin was not clever enough! It’s time to chop all of those useless far-left commissions in half!
Prop D wouldn’t have passed anyway.
It was 56.7 percent rejected, losing by almost a landslide even with 10 million to market it, mainly due to the reasons that they clearly didn’t want the mayor to have more power.
And if the task force doesn’t realize that fact, when their requested changes go to the people again, there’s going to be a massive embarrassment waiting for them.
People didn’t like them bringing in a grenade to fix a system, and city employees bringing another one will just get overwhelmingly rejected again at the ballot box.
All they want is to trim commissions they don’t need.
Always funny to see the motivated reasoning: when well funded causes win, it’s because the billionaires rammed it through; when they lose, it’s because that’s what the people wanted.
So you’re saying money is what politics runs on, gee. Yeah.
It’s not untrue.
The idea of moving power from people we do not elect (commission members) to people we do elect (the mayor) should have broad support.
Go back to Fox News, you’re not loud enough.
“Far-left”? Huh? I’m going to assume you aren’t a native English speaker.